A lot of things make Lauren Sánchez Bezos ridiculously happy. Helicopters. Fashion. Protecting the narwhal. Her little sister, Elena. Her five best girlfriends. And, of course, her new husband, Jeff Bezos.
She and Mr. Bezos do everything together. On a typical day, the newlyweds wake up around 6 in their new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an exclusive private island in Miami often called “Billionaire Bunker.” They don’t touch their phones. Instead, they begin each day by listing 10 things they’re grateful for — and they can’t repeat what they named the day before.
From there, the couple drink their morning coffee in a sunroom and watch the sun rise: hers from a mug that reads “Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again,” his from one she got him that spells HUNK in symbols from the periodic table. They play pickleball. Six days a week, they work out for an hour with a private trainer. “He looks good, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said of her new husband, in an interview in Miami in January. She slow-nodded, repeating, “He looks good.”
By now, it is hard to conjure the version of Mr. Bezos that existed before. Mildly awkward; faintly hermetic in Seattle. The logistical mastermind of two-day shipping. Now, he is gym-hardened, frequently shirtless, captured mid-laugh in paparazzi photos, canoodling on his megayacht, a man who has discovered joy, love and cosmetic dermatology.
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos has, in turn, adopted some Jeff-isms, like Amazon corporate rituals — such as requesting memos no more than six-pages long ahead of meetings at the Bezos Earth Fund, where she is the vice chair.
The couple is now best thought of as a unit. “I talk about everything with him. Everything! Jeff is my best friend, and I don’t say that lightly,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said.
Mr. Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, relies on her advice on nearly everything — and vice versa. For instance, in early March, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos published her second children’s book, “The Fly Who Flew Under the Sea,” about Flynn, a dyslexic fly whose wrong turn leads to an undersea adventure. Mr. Bezos edited the book, suggesting a change to the illustrated submarine on the cover. “He said it should be fantastical, not realistic,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. “Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I don’t.” She changed it.
I met Mrs. Sánchez Bezos in January at an Argentine restaurant in Miami Beach; a security guard named John arrived first to scope out the place. If Mrs. Sánchez Bezos is alone, she can often blend in, but if Mr. Bezos is on her arm, all hell breaks loose. She had been across the street at a J.P. Morgan leadership conference, where Mr. Bezos had spoken the day before about Project Prometheus, his new artificial intelligence start-up, with $6.2 billion in funding.
In person, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos is surprisingly tiny, less lacquered than the glossy images that circulate online. She picked out a window booth, and when the hostess said it was reserved, she smiled. “Oh,” she said. “I want to know who’s sitting there.” She tossed her black Birkin bag, adorned with each of her children’s names and a Flynn the Fly keychain, on another corner table and asked the server his name. (“That’s Luciano,” she said to me. “He’s from Argentina.”) When somebody suddenly turned the music up, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos shimmied and joked: “Want me to dance on the table? That gets a lot of attention.”
You would think that marrying into obscene wealth would transform a person, but in this case, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos appears less changed than her husband; the world has long been her Everything Store. Even before she married Mr. Bezos, whose net worth is estimated to be roughly $250 billion, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos liked to think she was 20 percent happier than the average person. Even when she was 18, crashing in a cousin’s garage in Carson, Calif., after she hadn’t gotten her dream job as a Southwest Airlines flight attendant because she was a few pounds over the weight limit, she was still basically happy.
“If baseline is here,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said, holding her hand about chest height, “I’m up here,” with her other hand above her head.
The couple had recently returned from Seattle, where Mr. Bezos celebrated his 62nd birthday by making pancakes for all of their seven children from previous marriages. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, 56, adores kids. Having them. Raising them. Encouraging other people to have them. Over several interviews, she repeatedly urged me to have another baby. “Do it!” she said. “I would have another one tomorrow. Tomorrow.” I finally asked if she and Mr. Bezos were considering it, as a couple of her friends had suggested to me. “I would have a baby tomorrow,” she repeated, with a coy smile. (A spokeswoman later called to say Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was not having a baby.)
But honestly, why not? Mrs. Sánchez Bezos has shown that with the right attitude and mind-boggling wealth, anything is possible. Space travel. The Met Gala. Fertility after 50.
Her happiness is infectious, undeniable, world-historical. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos treats the pursuit — and spreading — of joy as a kind of mandate. But when one of the world’s wealthiest people radiates this much happiness, is it celebration, or provocation? Is she just rubbing it in?
Brentwood Country Mart Babe Paley
There’s a perception that Mrs. Sánchez Bezos started rolling with the A-list only after marrying Mr. Bezos, but it’s actually the other way around. Back when Mr. Bezos’ connection to Hollywood largely consisted of his deep involvement with adapting the theological nuances of Middle-earth into a billion-dollar television version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel “The Lord of the Rings,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was already known in Los Angeles as a networker. A modern-day Brentwood Country Mart Babe Paley who counts Kris Jenner, Katy Perry, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lydia Kives, wife of the superconnector Michael Kives, among her close friends.
“People act like he’s my new friend,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said of Mr. DiCaprio. “No, I’ve known Leo since I was 25. Twenty-five.”
In June, Mr. Bezos and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos wed in a lavish three-day bacchanal in Venice. The weekend included a prewedding foam party on Mr. Bezos’ superyacht and water taxis that ferried 200 guests — including Sydney Sweeney, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Queen Rania of Jordan, and five members of the Kardashian-Jenner family — across the Venetian lagoon to watch the couple exchange vows on San Giorgio Maggiore. To some, it was a tone-deaf display of staggering wealth at a time of historic inequality.
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos gets choked up talking about what the public didn’t see: the toasts by all their children; the high school friends of Mr. Bezos’ whom nobody bothered to photograph. Phones were banned from the ceremony and reception. But “no NDAs!” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said, referring to nondisclosure agreements. “They’re our friends! And you did not see one picture come out of that wedding.”
This is a frequent lament from her: that people don’t see the couple’s actual life. “What you see is 5 percent of my life,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. (At The New York Times’s 2024 DealBook Summit, Mr. Bezos said he “gave up on being well understood a long time ago.”)
Hours after she said “I do,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos wiped her entire Instagram account. “I did a whole reset,” she said. “You’re still yourself, but you are different.” A stream of bikini selfies and bachelorette shots was replaced by a single photo of herself in a demure lace wedding gown with a traditional veil. Would marrying into extreme wealth at a moment of rage over inequality chasten Mrs. Sánchez Bezos? Would she embrace cashmere and the muted wardrobe of quiet luxury? Retreat into the refined, semi-reclusive existence of the uber-rich, where foam is on an amuse-bouche, not Sydney Sweeney?
After all, for decades, there was an unspoken bargain with America’s ultra-moneyed. They could enjoy unimaginable privilege as long as they projected austerity or stayed largely out of the limelight. Warren Buffett in a modest home in Omaha. Mark Zuckerberg in hoodies and an Acura. They mostly left the conspicuous displays of the good life — over-the-top birthday parties, flashy cars, cosmetic enhancements — to celebrities and reality-TV stars.
But Mrs. Sánchez Bezos is nothing if not a woman intent on sampling the full menu. She hasn’t just changed Mr. Bezos into a man who hosts Kris Jenner’s James Bond-themed 70th birthday party at his Los Angeles home: Sometimes it seems she’s taken the entire culture with her.
After years defined by financial crisis, pandemic lockdowns and moral earnestness, unabashed rich-person exuberance is back with a Blue Origin bang, a Mar-a-Lago makeover of the White House and a Zuckerberg rap cover. The Bezos’ marriage seems, at times, as much a cultural inflection point as a love story — the moment American money stopped apologizing and decided it might as well enjoy itself.
“They are to quiet luxury what Las Vegas is to the Mormon Church,” said Graydon Carter, the longtime Vanity Fair editor.
“They have this symbiotic relationship with the press and their haters,” said Janice Min, the chief executive of Ankler Media, known for its buzzy Hollywood newsletter, and a former editor of Us Weekly. “The haters feed them, and it feels like the more outrage they create, the more they double down.”
From the outset, the couple have embraced spectacle. When The National Enquirer dropped an 11-page, salacious exposé of their affair in 2019, Mr. Bezos didn’t hide behind legalese. He came out slugging, accusing the tabloid’s parent company of political motives and arguing that his ownership of The Washington Post, with its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” posture during President Trump’s first term, had made him a target.
Today, the talk is less about Mr. Bezos’ adversarial relationship with Mr. Trump and more about his supposedly cozy one. After years of hostility — much of it tied to Mr. Trump’s attacks on The Post — the temperature between the two men has cooled. Mr. Bezos personally intervened to stop a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris by the paper, according to newsroom employees. (He argued in a note to readers that “presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” and “create a perception of bias.”) He then attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration last year, seated front and center. Amazon paid roughly $40 million to license “Melania,” a documentary about the first lady — a move that some critics saw as an attempt to curry favor with President Trump.
The détente comes as Democrats have aggressively targeted Amazon’s market power, and other tech titans have embraced the Trump presidency. Mr. Bezos’ former wife, MacKenzie Scott, has given much of her fortune to liberal causes, but he has long held broadly libertarian views. Lately, he seems more comfortable expressing them. Last year, Mr. Bezos instructed The Post’s opinion pages to advocate “personal liberties and free markets.”
When she was married to the Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos attended President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and she gave money to Democratic candidates, including Ms. Harris in 2019 and Senator Cory Booker in 2018, according to OpenSecrets, a group that tracks political spending. When I asked her opinion of Mr. Trump, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, who is breezy and agile at pivoting back to the fun topics, waved me off. “I am not talking politics,” she said. “No, no, no, no, no. No way.”
People close to Mrs. Sánchez Bezos often argue that it’s not fair to criticize her for her husband’s political and business decisions. The frequent refrain is, “What does that have to do with Lauren?” But that is the downside to being a conjoined organism to a master of the universe: It all has to do with you.
In January, the couple made the couture rounds in Paris. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was dripping in vintage Dior with fur and diamonds. She stepped out of a chauffeured Mercedes in a blood-red Schiaparelli skirt suit alongside Anna Wintour. The trip happened to coincide with an announcement that Amazon planned to lay off 16,000 employees. It was a juxtaposition that some TikTok users compared to “The Hunger Games.” (Mr. Bezos stepped down as chief executive of Amazon in 2021, though he remains executive chairman and its largest individual shareholder.)
A few weeks later, The Post, which Mr. Bezos bought in 2013, laid off about a third of its newsroom. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — and seemingly every journalist with a social media account — criticized Mr. Bezos’ ownership, accusing him of gutting the paper that broke the Watergate scandal. Chuck Todd, the former NBC host, said Mr. Bezos was “leaning into the evil, rich-guy stereotype.” Many saw the move as a deliberate effort to appease Mr. Trump. And Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was considered to be complicit. During Paris Fashion Week, Blakely Neiman Thornton, an internet personality and fashion critic, called Mrs. Sánchez Bezos “capitalism’s concubine” in a post.
The constant criticism wears on her, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. “I can never imagine writing something mean on somebody’s Instagram,” she added. “It would actually break my heart. I want positive: You look great. You’re amazing. I want to just give everyone flowers. Why wouldn’t you?” Recently, her eldest son, Nikko, whom she shares with the former National Football League tight end Tony Gonzalez, installed an app on her phone to block her from using social media during the day.
When I asked about the layoffs at The Post — the union implored its members to tag Mrs. Sánchez Bezos in a social media campaign protesting newsroom cuts — she turned cautious again. “I was a journalist, and I know how important journalism is,” she said. “But I don’t make those business decisions, so I really can’t answer them.”
Several friends of the couple told me the same thing: If they had been married back then, Mr. Bezos never would have bought a newspaper. He would have bought an N.F.L. team. Like a normal billionaire.
If Kate Middleton Were a Kardashian
Another day in January, I met Mrs. Sánchez Bezos at the Santa Monica Airport in California, near where she keeps a sleek, black Bell 429 helicopter. If there’s one thing she wants people to know, it’s that she is a helicopter pilot, a rarity in the notoriously male-dominated industry. She and Mr. Bezos first fell in love when she flew him around in a helicopter like this one. “I feel most myself in the air,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. “It’s like controlled excitement.” (It’s also a bit of a press strategy for her: She took a Vogue reporter on a trip like this one, too.)
The daughter of middle-class Mexican American parents in Albuquerque, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos always exhibited a driven, buzzing restlessness, which she now chalks up in part to her A.D.H.D. diagnosis. When the Southwest Airlines flight attendant dream died, she pivoted to broadcast journalism. “People are like, oh, what has she ever done,” she said. “And it’s like, oh, my gosh, I’ve had an entire career that I was super proud of.”
As a co-anchor on “Good Day L.A.,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos went skydiving on camera. At “Extra,” she interviewed Cher and Bill Clinton. She hosted the first season of “So You Think You Can Dance” and auditioned twice to co-host “The View,” but didn’t get the job. (“That was rough, by the way,” she said.)
In 2005, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos married Mr. Whitesell, previously the executive chairman of Endeavor, the sports and entertainment conglomerate. He’s something like the Tom Brady of Hollywood agents, with a client list that has included Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Hugh Jackman.
In 2012, at 42, she got the itch to fly, and later founded Black Ops Aviation, an aerial production company. Friends say Mrs. Sánchez Bezos has always been savvy about her image. She would urge the tabloids to cover her red-carpet appearances, deftly turn on the charm for the paparazzi and reach out to trade reporters to write about her helicopter production company.
The day we met, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association asked her to speak to a group of mostly Black and Latino high school students interested in careers in aviation. She arrived in an S.U.V. with a small entourage, glammed down in a ponytail, a brown leather bomber jacket and aviator sunglasses.
When she works these nonprofit events, it’s a little like if Kate Middleton were a Kardashian. She’s a big hugger, pulling teenagers in to ask their names and what they’re studying. A pilot handed her a book he wrote, adding, “It’s available on Amazon.” She held it up for the cameras. “Got to support the family business!” she said.
It was an overcast day, but Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was optimistic. “The clouds aren’t that dense! We can cut right through them!” she said, settling into the buttery leather pilot’s seat. She banked past the Hollywood sign and over verdant hills dotted with mansions and tennis courts. “That’s Beverly Hills,” she said. “Would you look at those homes!”
In May, Mr. Bezos and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos will serve as honorary chairs of the Met Gala. Amazon sponsored the event in 2012, and the couple attended it in 2024. But serving as lead sponsors is a different animal, essentially anointing them fashion royalty. The announcement of the sponsorship was met with abject horror by fashion industry insiders, who said the couple had “hijacked” the gala.
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos told me that Ms. Wintour had reached out directly to ask if the couple would back the fund-raiser. “Anna called me, and I was like, ‘Anna who?’” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos joked, then called it “such an honor.”
Ms. Wintour said the gala this year required a high-octane chair. “Lauren is a force,” she wrote in an email. “The Costume Institute’s exhibition this year is an enormous, complicated project in a new gallery at the heart of the museum, and I thought the gala needed that energy.” (When I asked Mrs. Sánchez Bezos about rumors that she and her husband were buying Vogue’s parent company, Condé Nast, she teased, “I wish!” She then said, “No.”)
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos has appeared in Vogue twice, including a cover spread on her wedding, and she recently enlisted stylist-to-the-stars Law Roach to help her with her image in advance of the Met Gala. Ms. Wintour was once famously averse to featuring large-busted women in the magazine, I pointed out. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos shrugged. “Maybe she likes them now,” she said.
A lot of the snark about her appearance and her clothes feels rooted in racial stereotypes, she argued. “It’s the shape of my body,” she said. “Is someone going to give me a gunnysack and ask me to put a belt on it and cinch it? I’m Latin. I’m Latin. I’m Latin.”
That’s not to say she isn’t aware of the backlash to her look. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos thought she had dressed conservatively for Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, in a white Alexander McQueen pantsuit. “I was super proud of myself,” she said. When the event suddenly moved indoors, she removed her coat. The blazer opened, revealing a lace bra. Since they were seated directly behind Mr. Trump, the bra was in pretty much every photo of the event. “I get it,” she said. “No lace at the White House. Noted.”
Can Happiness Scale?
In September, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos headed to the Winthrop STEM Elementary Magnet School in New London, Conn. She had just signed on as a “literacy ambassador” for Scholastic and would be reading to kindergartners from her first book, “The Fly Who Flew to Space,” about Flynn, the dyslexic fly. The book is in some ways autobiographical. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos struggled in school and always thought she was dumb, until a college teacher recognized that she had dyslexia. “I grew up literally thinking I was the stupidest person on the planet,” she told me. “I got kicked off the cheerleading squad because I couldn’t even keep a 2.0 G.P.A. Who can’t keep a 2.0?”
“I was one bad decision away from something really bad, a bad life,” she said. (She’s joked with friends that she could’ve wound up a stripper.) It wasn’t until she met Mr. Bezos that she truly felt intelligent. “He literally tells me all the time, ‘You’re one of the smartest women I know,’” she said.
Today, she reads technical papers about the cost of nuclear and geothermal power as part of her work at the Bezos Earth Fund. “She wants to have an opinion and speak about these things intelligently,” said Tom Taylor, chief executive of the fund and a longtime Amazon executive who is close to Mr. Bezos.
Last year, Mr. Bezos tapped Mr. Taylor, who ran the Alexa division at Amazon, to lead the fund, which operates less like a traditional nonprofit than an extension of Mr. Bezos’ worldview: that invention and technological progress can often lift more people than simply cutting a check. In addition to more traditional climate initiatives, it is investing in satellite systems to detect wildfires, deploying A.I. tools to Indigenous tribes for reforestation and to Alaskan fishermen to monitor illegal fishing. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos recently visited a remote island off Costa Rica to meet rangers who work to protect hammerhead sharks and sea turtles.
The nonprofit has so far distributed at least $2.4 billion in grants, making Mr. Bezos “among the biggest climate philanthropists around,” said David Callahan, author of “The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age.”
And yet, he added, Mr. Bezos’ charitable work lags compared with his tiny cadre of peers. “He’s a big philanthropist, just not relative to his fortune.”
And he is frequently compared with his former wife, Ms. Scott, who has upended traditional philanthropy, giving away roughly $26 billion of her fortune, quietly and with few conditions.
Ms. Scott seems to be following in the grand tradition of the American uber-rich who burnished their reputations via noblesse oblige, established in our last Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers. Their descendants have continued the mission.
Mr. Bezos and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos can seem more allied with the rising class of billionaires who, frustrated with the glacial pace of nonprofits, want to improve the world with privately funded ventures, like their space company or their A.I. explorations. “So, 10,000 years ago, or whenever it was, somebody invented the plow, and we all got richer,” Mr. Bezos said at a tech conference last year.
In a joint interview with Mrs. Sánchez Bezos in November 2022, Mr. Bezos said he would give away a majority of his then-roughly $124 billion fortune. Today, he has more than double that amount. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos would like to expand the couple’s footprint, but emphasized a deliberate approach. “Philanthropy is a job,” she said. “You have to vet everyone, make sure the money is being used in the right way.”
The couple’s charitable giving has been closely linked to their social and celebrity ties. This summer, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, with the Earth Fund, and Mr. DiCaprio’s Re:wild organization will announce a joint commitment to save species near extinction. In 2021, Mr. Bezos and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos started the Bezos Courage and Civility Award, giving José Andrés, Dolly Parton and Van Jones each $100 million to grant to charities and nonprofits of their choosing. Later, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos’ longtime friend Eva Longoria was given $50 million for similar work. More recently, smaller, targeted grants have included $5 million to Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and prominent critic of social media’s effect on young people.
“With that kind of money, you can’t just sprinkle it around at galas,” said Mr. Callahan, who also edits Inside Philanthropy.
This tension may be at the heart of what unsettles some of Mrs. Sánchez Bezos’ critics. Fairly or not, she’s often compared with Ms. Scott — bookish, private and almost defiantly out of the spotlight. Whereas Mrs. Sánchez Bezos embraces philanthropy, but also the pleasure that comes with wealth — the visibility, the proximity to power, the fashion, the fun.
She is fluent in fame. But power is a whole other language, especially as one half of a couple whose reach rivals that of a nation-state. She wants to spread happiness into every room she enters, but happiness can’t scale. Happiness can’t pay the rent.
Back at the elementary school in Connecticut, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos told the students about going to space on Mr. Bezos’ private Blue Origin rocket. “I went to space with Katy Perry,” she said. “Yes! How fun is that? It was like a girls’ trip to space.” The flight was widely mocked as a “boondoggle,” an emblem of late-stage “end times” excess.
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, however, does not traffic in cynicism. “It was the coolest thing ever,” she told the students. A little boy raised his hand to ask if she’s ever been to another planet.
“No,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos replied. “Sometimes it feels like I’m on another planet — but no.”
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