The Bezoses in Venice...
Whatever happened to noblesse oblige?
If second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience as Dr. Johnson (or was it Oscar Wilde?) would have it I have more or less come to see Jeff Bezos — or Jefe Boss — as perhaps the world’s most hopeful man.
Still, one has to talk a little bit about good taste. How does one spend $50m on a wedding anyway? The sheer excess of the thing is altogether unfathomable and rather unnecessary.
Couldn’t Bezos have married Sanchez in their native New Mexico? Didn’t Bezos himself tell Congress that “the rest of the world would love even the tiniest sip of the elixir we have here in the U.S.”? Evidently not.
One gets the sense that in choosing Venice — a city sinking and a harbinger of our warming future — he is imagining himself as a sexagenarian James Bond with his rather buxom Bond girl at his side.
Didn’t Bezos buy James Bond anyway? Maybe he envisions himself in the role? After all, didn’t his bride blast herself off into space with her gal pals?
Sean Connery, Roger Moore and Daniel Craig all found themselves in Venice for King and Country and so, perhaps fittingly, so did Bezos.
How shall he be remembered? I suspect not fondly. Where is our George Grosz to chronicle our Weimar America? Would such an artist even make it in our world of social media manipulation? Of course he wouldn’t. He would be quickly put down. How many artists nowadays are being extinguished from our cooly controlled algorithms? A friend sent this in and he’s right to draw the comparisons with the photo above.
On the other hand I suppose every marriage is, in a certain sense, a trade though I confess to struggling to see just what’s really going on here with Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos. Isn’t it interesting that the world’s richest woman is a Latina?
A friend asks if this is the Oppenheimer network reasserting itself and perhaps even strutting on a national stage. Could be, I say, and he’s right to direct my attention to something I had erstwhile written about Bezos’s grandfather, Lawrence Gise.
Other more diligent researchers have pointed out that Gise’s grandfather was almost certainly responsible for the theft of nuclear material that enabled Israel to acquire a nuclear weapon, which, if true, is something certainly known by the right sorts of people.
That looming shadow over whether or not Bezos was targeted by Pegasus during the negotiations over the JEDI contract and then whether that material was leaked to the National Enquirer remains one of the more interesting questions about the role the IDF’s Unit 8200 has played in trying to reshape our defense stock. I don’t know enough to talk about this intelligently but I have heard rumblings.
There are among us some who think that Bezos is a “Secret Mormon” and point to his natural father’s surname Jorgenson and its rich connections with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
Be that as it may, it’s rather obvious, isn’t it that Miguel Bezos, the CIA man oil man turned adoptive father, is Bezos’s real father. Does it much matter if you share the same blood if you share the same vision of the world? I think not.
One of the things you’re not supposed to ask if how many of the Gen X billionaires are rather stealthily operated by their Silent Generation fathers.
Italy seems to be the most pro-American of the European member states and for all the braying about Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni being a Fascist she’s been a dear friend to America.
Could it be true love? Maybe so. Whatever the reason Sánchez seems to delight in being Ms. Bezos which is a role that the other Mrs. Bezos doesn’t seem to care for.
My heart goes out there to the novelist manqué who now goes by MacKenzie Scott and who has donated some $19.3 billion to over 1600 charitable organizations. I can’t help but think that Bezos traded down. His children and Ms. Sánchez’s were reportedly in attendance so perhaps all is well there.
Far be it from me to begrudge a man an indulgence here or there but if we are honest about the thing it’s all way too much.
That such a vulgar display took place the same week that New York all but elected a Democratic Socialist portends interesting things for a coming our public life.
One gets the sense that that quip that “every billionaire is a policy failure” is more likely the future than the alternative.
Bezos, for his part, seemingly bought off the locals and seemingly did so quite cheaply.
“Those who protest are in contradiction with the history of Venice, which is a history of relations, contacts and business,” mayor Luigi Brugnaro told Reuters.
“Bezos embodies the Venetian mentality. He is more Venetian than the protesters,” said the centre-right mayor, adding that he hoped Bezos, who donated €3m (£2.5m) to local institutions, would return to the city to do business.
Brugnaro said Bezos had attached no conditions to holding his wedding celebrations in Venice, and city hall had only learned about his donations after they had been made.
Ah, yes. The American oligarch finds the Italian way much to his liking.
I find Trump's continued reference to this current time as the new "Golden Era" a very interesting choice of words. Most ppl thought that MAGA meant a return to mid-century pre-Civil rights America when Donald was a young man. But the more I think about it, he's referencing a return to The Gilded Era: the time American Oligarchs ran the country before they drove it in the ground during the 20s and allowed FDR to flatten society and create a middle class (that America thrived under) through the 40s, on.
If not for The Great Depression, America was well on its way to become an oligarchy. A society whose billionaires were handpicked not by the presidents, but by JP Morgan Chase, the true wizard behind the curtain. It's been the billionaire class's mission ever since, to return America to its rightful class framework. Perhaps that's Elon's obsession: to become today's JP Morgan Chase with his financial app bridging crypto (BRICS) and USG treasury. Then he can control the oligarchs in both realms.
In true Trumpian style (who should supplant the coined term "orwellian", I wonder), he refers to this time as "golden" which is a step up from "gilded". Gilded is not golden, but golden is gold through and through; that is if the gold was all ones and zeros.
Agreed…