Jeff Bezos & Lauren Sánchez Wed In 3-Day, $50M Celebration Amid Harsh Criticism Of Gaudy Display Of Excess

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Baila Eve ZismanJune 30, 2025, 1:43 pmHomepage Slider, News >

From June 27 to June 29, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez celebrated their long-awaited nuptials with a widely condemned $50 million celebration in Venice, Italy.

The wedding was hosted at the former medieval shipyard, Arsenale, and had approximately 200 guests, including many high-profile celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, and Usher. Unrelentingly secretive about the ceremony, Bezos and Sánchez asked their guests not to use social media during the event. All attendees seemingly respected this request. Five luxury hotels were booked for the wedding, with Bezos and Sánchez staying at the Aman hotel, where rooms cost between $1,800 $10,000 a night.

According to an analysis from Italy’s Ministry of Tourism, the wedding generated roughly $1.1 billion (€957.3 million) in total economic value for the city of Venice. The Ministry estimated that over 90% of the surge was due to the event’s global media exposure. The town, which receives approximately 13 million tourists a year, typically generates $1.6 billion annually. Bezos’ three-day wedding accounted for 68% of that figure, resulting in a cost of roughly $5.6 million per guest at the event.

Bezos and Sánchez had initially planned to host the event at a different location in the city. However, citizen protests against the billionaire, which threatened canal blockades, banners and unflattering mannequins of Bezos across the city, caused the couple to make a last-minute venue switch, just weeks ahead of their wedding.

Venetians are not the only ones peeved by Bezos and Sánchez’s extravagant display of wealth, with many celebrities and reporters weighing in with their disgust for the billionaire’s ethical shortcomings. On Saturday, actress Charlize Theron criticized the couple while hosting the fifth annual block party for the Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, bluntly declaring, “They suck.”

As Bezos and Sánchez’s wedding was a star-studded event, Theron remarked, “I think we might be the only people who did not get an invite to the Bezos wedding. But that’s OK because they suck and we’re cool.”