On sidewalks and subway cars, posters began popping up this week urging New Yorkers to boycott this year’s Met Gala over the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos’ involvement in the event.
In February, Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, were announced as the lead sponsors and honorary chairs of the gala, a starry fund-raiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is traditionally held on the first Monday in May. For many, the so-called party of the year, with its celebrity guests and carnivalesque red carpet, had long since come to epitomize the country’s yawning wealth inequality.
But the sponsorship from the Bezoses, who have aligned themselves with the Trump White House, struck some activists as a particular outrage, especially at a time when the United States faces economic uncertainty at home and is embroiled in a war overseas.
“The Bezos Met Gala: Brought to you by worker exploitation,” read one poster plastered on a wall a few blocks from the museum, seemingly alluding to allegations of worker mistreatment at Amazon fulfillment centers.
A similar poster described the event as “brought to you by the firm that powers ICE” and shows a canister of tear gas on a red carpet — a reference to reports that the company was cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security in its efforts to deport immigrants, and that its technology has been used to support the agency’s operations.
The postering campaign was organized by an activist group called Everyone Hates Elon, according to one of the group’s founders, who requested not to be identified for fear of arrest. (Many of the group’s demonstrations involve unlawful vandalism.)
The group, which describes itself as anti-billionaire, arguing that the ultrawealthy represent systemic economic issues, created an online donation portal last week and has so far raised 10,000 pounds, or about $13,000, the activist said in a phone interview on Friday. She said the group used that money to recruit activists in New York to put the posters up around the city starting Monday.
A video posted on the Instagram account for Everyone Hates Elon — the group’s name refers to Elon Musk, the billionaire co-founder of Tesla — shows a person in a black hoodie using a screwdriver to open a display case aboard a subway car. Facing away from the camera, the person works quickly to open the case and slip in a poster — in the Met’s signature shade of bright red — accusing Mr. Bezos of “enabling ICE.”
At least one prominent New Yorker, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, has said he will be skipping the event to focus instead on “making the most expensive city in the United States affordable,” breaking with a tradition of past mayors’ attending the gala to show support for the cultural institution.
Everyone Hates Elon was started last year in Britain by a handful of people from around the world and has become an organization with a knack for guerrilla installations tailor-made to ricochet around the internet. In February, the group affixed to a wall in the Louvre Museum a framed photograph of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince and the younger brother of King Charles III, shortly after his arrest on suspicion of having shared confidential government information with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
During Mr. Bezos’ wedding to Ms. Sánchez, in Venice, the group unfurled an enormous banner in the middle of the Piazza San Marco, the city’s central public square, with a picture of a laughing Mr. Bezos beneath the words “If you can rent Venice for your wedding you can pay more tax.”
Given the number of eyeballs the Met Gala commands, the event has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been a hotbed of protest in recent years — well before Mr. Bezos’ involvement as a sponsor. In 2024 and 2025, pro-Palestinian demonstrators lined up outside the museum to try to disrupt the event. Climate activists chanted demands for clean air in 2023, and in 2021, Black Lives Matter protesters were arrested outside the museum.
In recent years, the gala and the Costume Institute’s corresponding exhibition have often been sponsored by major fashion houses such as Chanel, Louis Vuitton or Saint Laurent and tech giants like Apple and Instagram. (In previous years, a sponsor is known to have kicked in roughly $5 million.)
In 2024, when TikTok was the lead sponsor of the exhibition, there was a substantial interest in whether Shou Chew, the company’s chief executive and its public face during closely watched congressional testimony investigating potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party, would actually attend the gala. But before the announcement of Mr. Bezos’ sponsorship, there was little precedent for a chair facing such concentrated opposition.
A representative for the Costume Institute, the Met’s fashion wing and the direct beneficiary of the gala, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday afternoon.
On the museum’s carpet-draped stairs, some guests have used their moment in the spotlight to champion specific causes. In 2021, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, attended the gala in a white gown with the words “Tax the Rich” scrawled across the back.
In the interview, the Everyone Hates Elon co-founder described one upside — from her point of view — of Mr. Bezos’ sponsorship of the gala. Instead of organizing against an abstract notion like “the rich,” she suggested, it’s much easier to mobilize opposition to wealth inequality when you can put a face to the issue.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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