Friends,
Last night was the Met Gala, an annual homage to the conspicuous extravagance of America’s wealthy. Its honorary chairs this year were, appropriately, Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos.
If you wanted a ticket to the Bezos Ball, all you needed to do was shell out $100,000 and wear something memorably daring and expensive. Oh, and you’d also have to be on the “A List” of Very Wealthy People.
A record 55 percent of Americans now report their financial situation is worsening, citing severe stress from high inflation, housing costs, and rising gas prices, according to Gallup/USA Today polling. One in 3 households is unable to cover a month of living expenses. Prices are soaring, wages are going nowhere, millions are losing access to health insurance. Yet corporate profits are in the stratosphere.
This year’s Met Gala was a testament to the vapid arrogance of the Bezos’s and other neo-Robber Barons of this second Gilded Age.
As I mentioned recently, Bezos has made his fortune off the backs of millions of working people. According to a newly unsealed filing in an antitrust lawsuit, Bezos’s Amazon has pressured major brands like Levi’s and Hanes to demand that competing retailers raise prices on their products.
Another recent lawsuit against Bezos accused Amazon of making it difficult for consumers to cancel its Prime subscription service. Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and additional payouts to consumers — but didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Bezos’s workers are among the worst-treated in America. Bezos is virulently anti-union. Until Trump took over the National Labor Relations Board, its attorneys were prosecuting Amazon for firing delivery employees because they’d voted to join the Teamsters, a direct violation of labor laws.
On April 6, an Amazon warehouse worker collapsed and died on the floor of Amazon’s warehouse in Troutdale, Oregon. A co-worker trained in CPR tried to help but was told by an Amazon manager not to. For more than an hour, employees said, they were instructed to continue packing items and loading trucks as the man lay dead. One manager reportedly told workers to “just turn around and not look” and get back to work.
As of April 2026, Bezos’s net worth was estimated to be between $259 billion and $269 billion, making him one of the three richest people in the world. And he won’t let anyone forget it.
He celebrated his wedding last year to Lauren Sánchez with a multi-day event in Venice, Italy, estimated to cost more than $50 million, featuring guests like Oprah Winfrey and Kim Kardashian.
His “homes” include three adjacent properties on Indian Creek Island in Florida, costing over $230 million; the former Warner estate in Beverly Hills, California, which features a 13,600-square-foot mansion and a golf course, which he purchased for $165 million; a 14-acre compound on Maui with a 4,500-square-foot main house and 700-square-foot pool; a $23 million mansion in Washington, D.C.; and a massive multi-lot compound with waterfront frontage in Medina, Washington.
What really puts Bezos at the head of all the other robber barons in this second Gilded Age is his slavish sycophancy toward the worst president in American history.
Bezos bought the legendary Washington Post for $250 million in October 2013 and has turned it into a Trump media suck-up — prohibiting its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024 and barring it from writing anything critical about American capitalism or Trump.
In February, Bezos fired more than 300 Post journalists, about a third of the staff. He paid $40 million to license the documentary “Melania” plus $35 million to market it — and earned back almost none of it — a blatant bribe of Trump.
And he does whatever Trump wants. After Trump complained to Bezos about Amazon’s plans to display for consumers the costs of Trump’s tariffs, Bezos immediately canceled the plan.
Bezos has sucked up to Trump presumably to secure Pentagon contracts for his Blue Origin rocket company, which landed a $2.3 billion NASA contract early in Trump’s second term. And to avoid further antitrust lawsuits or labor law scrutiny.
That he has zero scruples does not necessarily distinguish Bezos from the other robber barons of this despicable era. And one could say it’s not Bezos’s “fault” that he’s filthy rich — he’s just taken advantage of the current system. But he’s also made the system even more rotten.
Why did the Met choose him and his wife as honorary co-chairs of last night’s gala? It’s his money, of course. But there’s nothing honorable about him. His public-be-damned business practices, his conspicuous consumption, and his excessive sucking up to Trump make Bezos, at least to my mind, the worst billionaire of them all.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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