Insiders spill the secrets behind a Bezos-sized ‘super-wedding’
When Jeff Bezos weds in Venice, it is expected to raise the bar on luxury events for the wealthiest people on Earth.
Floor-to-ceiling floral installations. Performances by pop megastars. Catering by Carbone. A security guard just for the gold-plated cutlery.
For the wealthiest people on Earth, it’s no longer enough to have a luxury wedding. Today, the new normal is a “super-wedding”, akin to a music festival in size and with costs running into the millions.
Anant and Radhika Ambani’s three-day wedding in India in 2024 included a custom-built glass palace and a performance by Rihanna.
The wedding of Sofia Richie Grainge and Atlantic Records chief executive Elliot Grainge in 2023 spanned several days in Antibes, France, featured haute couture Chanel gowns and an afterparty headlined by rock band Good Charlotte.
When Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tie the knot in Venice in a multiday celebration that’s anticipated this week, their event is expected to raise the bar even higher.
The trend has turned planners into “wedding producers”, as London luxury planner Sarah Haywood puts it, leading armies of vendors in pulling off what couples hope will not only be the most memorable event of their lives but their guests’ lives, too.
“It used to be about fireworks, then it was about drones,” says Colin Cowie, a luxury planner who has done weddings for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez. “Now, it’s shooting fireworks from drones.”
A multiday luxury wedding with 200 guests now carries a price tag of about $US4m ($6.1m), according to Jamie Simon, director of events at luxury planning firm Banana Split, which brought the Grainge wedding to life. Cowie says he has worked on weddings that cost eight figures.
The cost includes upscale vendors for everything from cocktail-hour caviar to nightclub-worthy sound and lighting. Those vendors need vendors, too; caterers are hiring food stylists to ensure their culinary creations are displayed artfully. Bartenders tap mixologists to craft bespoke cocktails. Florists are working with drapery artists, who add huge swathes of fabric for additional drama. Nearly everyone signs a nondisclosure agreement before the work begins.
“Luxury weddings have turned theatrical,” says Preston Bailey, an event designer who has planned weddings such as Ivanka Trump’s and the Ambani wedding in 2024.
Details about the Bezos-Sanchez wedding have remained largely under wraps. The couple hired wedding planner Lanza & Baucina, a discreet London-based group that planned George Clooney’s 2014 wedding, and is reportedly tying the knot on a Venetian island. Protests against the couple using Venice for their event are already under way.
A representative for Bezos and Sanchez declined to comment. Lanza & Baucina says its guiding principles and the instructions of its client call for the “minimising of any disruption to the city, the respect for its residents and institutions and the overwhelming employment of locals in the crafting of the events”.
A luxury destination wedding takes a village to produce. Haywood in London works with teams as large as 500 people for the events she plans. “We’ve got 80,000 rose stems here. Can you imagine how many people it takes to condition those flowers?” she says, taking a call while setting up a wedding near Monaco. She declines to name the couple.
Beyond manpower to set up, assist and serve, Haywood also maintains a 20-person team to assist with small details such as steaming bridesmaid dresses. They also look after family VIPs – making sure, for example, that “the grandparents have a drink at all times”.
“This type of client lives in a beautiful home and owns multiple homes that are fully staffed, so when they come and host a wedding, they require this level of service,” Haywood says.
Bailey says clients typically “hope to show the guests something they’ve never experienced before”. Bailey has built $US600,000 structures, rented 3m candelabras and ordered custom furniture from Egypt. He typically works with silk flowers for overhead installations, which can cost $US25,000 to $US75,000.
Wedding decor sometimes requires the work of a drapery artist, who swaddles walls and ceilings with miles of fabrics. “Drapery is the showcase of the party,” says Tommy Murphy, a drapery artist with Orlando, Florida-based Swag Decor. He recently worked on a luxury wedding in an upstate New York barn that had $US170,000 worth of drapery. “It doesn’t matter if you spend $US1m on flowers if you have ugly walls,” he says.
Wealthy couples also are opting for video mapping, where lighting artists project 3-D images throughout a venue. “They are immersive,” luxury lighting designer Ira Levy says. He says such projections cost $US60,000 to $US100,000. “We’ve taken people through different parts of the world.”
Bailey recently commissioned a $US500,000 holograph of a bride’s deceased grandfather to share well wishes. “For billionaires, if it’s exciting, they’ll go for it,” Bailey says.
Simon says Banana Split has worked with celebrity chefs such as Wolfgang Puck and Gordon Ramsay on weddings, though other clients prefer to keep it as casual as a menu of chicken and fries.
At this level, it has become common to work with a food stylist, to help “the menu tell a story”, says Olivier Cheng, a caterer based in New York. He says luxury catering can range from $US750 to $US1000 a head. Cheng recalls hiring a food stylist to work on a luxury wedding and set up a night-market style buffet with food stalls. “We created a spice-market story. We created a sardine story,” says Cheng. “People want more than just a three-course menu.”
Super-weddings often include a celebrity entertainer, where families shell out for a headliner to perform a few hits. “The Russians started this,” Haywood says. Families have paid top dollar to hire musicians such as Paul McCartney, Elton John, the Rolling Stones and Lionel Richie. Justin Bieber reportedly earned $10m for performing at the Ambani wedding in 2024. Through a representative, Bieber declined to comment.
The only musician he has found to be not bookable, Simon says, is Adele. Adele did not respond to a request for comment.
Increasingly, name-brand DJs such as Gryffin and Martin Solveig are in demand too, as couples look to turn the wedding afterparty into an Ibiza nightclub. “Even the DJs charge $US1m,” Bailey says.
Haywood says she has seen a slight drop in inquiries from American families, indicating some wealthy Americans aren’t feeling confident in the economy. She predicts more luxury American weddings will move abroad now that tariffs have hit the industry.
“You want European luxury? It doesn’t make sense to import it,” she says.
Haywood says it can be challenging to work with a population “where no one says no to them”.
“They’ll show me a photo and I’m like, that’s great California light, but you’re getting married in London on a rainy afternoon,” Haywood says.
She says a couple recently requested white peacocks at an August wedding in Italy – a request she couldn’t fulfil because summer is the peacock shedding season and so the birds would be featherless. (Not to mention aviary restrictions because of bird flu.) The bride was fixated on the detail and Haywood says she gently had to push back. “Ultimately you try to give the client what they want. But you have to steer them.”
Simon recalls sending a courier on a private jet from London to the Maldives to deliver celery salt because the couple felt the wedding’s bloody mary cocktails needed it.
“You want to make dreams come true, no matter how trivial it might sound,” he says, adding that his role requires him to take all requests seriously. “You can’t tell someone how to drive their Rolls-Royce.”
Bailey recalls a time when flowers shipped from The Netherlands for a wedding in Kuwait got stuck at the airport because of an alleged customs issue. “I had to send someone with $US3000 or $US4000 cash. At that point you’re willing to do anything.”
Ruth Minkowitz, a luxury event planner in Italy, says Venice weddings such as Bezos and Sanchez’s are a special kind of logistic nightmare. When her family’s company, Elite Kosher Events, has a wedding in Venice, they start getting ready six days in advance instead of three. “Food, plates, material, everything, it all goes by boat,” says Minkowitz. “You need a lot more personnel just to schlep.”
Minkowitz says she worked on a wedding at a historic castle on the outskirts of Rome two summers ago where the family requested the ancient building be pumped with airconditioning. Minkowitz says her team had to buy voltage from the Rome municipality to ensure they had enough energy.
“Italians would have been OK,” she says. “But we made the castle freezing. In July. Because the Americans like it cold.”
The Wall Street Journal
What do billionaires want for their nuptials?
by Ashley Wong
Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest people in the world, is getting married this week. What could he and his bride, former television journalist Lauren Sanchez, possibly want as a gift?
“Well, I wouldn’t get them anything that I could buy on Amazon,” jokes Jean Shafiroff, a philanthropist and socialite in New York City. Shafiroff says she does not know Bezos and Sanchez personally but has attended and given gifts at many sumptuous parties.
Gift registries are standard for most weddings. However, the etiquette is a little different for some very wealthy couples.
When Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were married in 2009, their three publicly available online gift registries – featuring items such as a $US300 KitchenAid stand mixer from Williams Sonoma and a Tiffany & Co $US295 silver vegetable spoon – were closely scrutinised by the public and the media. Trump and Kushner did not respond to requests for comment.
“Couples that are high-net worth have to be very careful when it comes to setting up a registry,” says Elaine Swann, an etiquette expert with 22 years of experience who has worked with high-net-worth clients. “It should be something that’s private and not a public registry.”
Including a registry link in the wedding invitation is considered a faux pas. “It’s really easy to look at a registry as a greedy, gross thing from the couple, right?” says Lizzie Post, co-president of the Emily Post Institute. “But the registry is actually supposed to be a helpful tool for the guests.”
Wedding etiquette experts say it is up to the couple to set expectations about whether and what to give. People familiar with the matter say Bezos and Sanchez have not asked guests for gifts. In May, the couple told guests that they donated to the UNESCO office in Venice, which preserves the city’s cultural heritage; CORILA, which works to protect the city’s lagoons; and Venice International University. Shafiroff, a well-known philanthropist in the New York social scene, says the likeliest path for Bezos and Sanchez would be to highlight a few charities they would like their guests to donate to.
Jaime Xie, daughter of Fortinet billionaire Ken Xie, model and former star of Netflix show Bling Empire, says her go-to wedding gifts are Hermes trays and blankets or Tiffany & Co home goods such as teacups. For the upcoming weddings of friends this northern summer, she says, she has her eye on Smeg’s $US800 toasters ($1235) made in collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana.
Billionaires can afford to get creative with gifts. To celebrate his dating anniversary with his wife, Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg (with help from rapper T-Pain) recorded and released a slowed-down, acoustic cover of Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz’s Get Low. The Meta co-founder also commissioned a bright-blue statue of Chan from sculptor Daniel Arsham – though Zuckerberg later revealed on Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend that Chan did not like it.
In 2004, Oracle founder Larry Ellison gave his fourth wife, Melanie Craft, 911,744 shares of Oracle stock as a wedding present.
Sanchez and Bezos have said little publicly about the gifts they have given or received. In early 2024, Sanchez posted a since-deleted Instagram photo praising a charm necklace her children had designed for her birthday. (The photo also showed her wearing a chain with the initials LB – perhaps a nod to her upcoming nuptials.) After she went up in a Blue Origin rocket in April, Sanchez posted on social media a bag given to her by the Kardashians: a $US6995 minaudiere shaped like a UFO.
Page Six reported that Bezos had a strict “no gifts” policy for his 60th birthday party last January. But in 2004 Bezos told the radio program Marketplace the most impactful gifts he received were the construction toys his grandfather gave him as a child, such as Legos, Erector sets and Lincoln Logs. For the fifth wedding anniversary of Bezos and former wife MacKenzie Scott, Scott gave him a 1.5m-tall Lego chest.
In the absence of clear guidance, experts say, an engraved picture frame or anything sentimental and personal to the couple’s interests always should be welcome.
A gift idea Swann has suggested in the past is buying the rights to a meaningful photo of the couple, such as the kind taken at red carpets for black-tie galas and fundraisers with professional photographers, and placing it in a personalised frame. Rare collectors’ items, depending on the couple’s interests, also can work.
The most important thing to remember, Swann says, is that guests shouldn’t stress over finding a gift that matches the couple’s financial means.
“Anytime you’re attending a wedding that’s in a whole other tax bracket, go into it owning the space that you have been invited into,” Swann says. “Recognise that your presence is a present to the couple who has invited you.”
The Wall Street Journal
The billionaire and the TV anchor
Their whirlwind romance began under a cloud of scandal, but now Lauren Sanchez, a former morning TV anchor with a love of flying, is set to wed Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest person, in a Venice extravaganza.
Both were married to other people when they began secretly dating sometime before 2019.
In January of that year, Bezos and his first wife, the publicity-shy MacKenzie Scott, announced their divorce, stating their intention to continue “our shared lives as friends.” Bezos met Scott in 1992 while they were both working at a New York hedge fund. They quit their jobs to co-found Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue, Washington.
A month after the split, Bezos publicly accused the US tabloid the National Enquirer of blackmail in an offer to prevent the publication of salacious photos and text messages with Sanchez.
He suggested the effort was orchestrated by Saudi Arabia, whose leaders were reportedly upset with how The Washington Post – which Bezos owns – covered the murder of its reporter Jamal Khashoggi.
However, Sanchez later revealed that her brother sold the phone content to the Enquirer for a reported $200,000.
With his new romance flourishing, Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021. Bezos, 61, stated his primary reason for pulling back was to dedicate more time and energy to Blue Origin, his space exploration company, and charity work.
He remains Amazon’s executive chairman, the retail giant’s biggest shareholder, and still holds considerable influence over the company’s direction.
Bezos and Sanchez are fixtures at Oscar parties and other celebrity haunts. Sanchez often uses Instagram to communicate, sometimes expressing her love for Bezos or her children. In 2023, they announced their engagement.
Bezos has notably changed his look during his relationship with the exuberantly dressed Sanchez, trading in the wardrobe of a scrawny tech executive for that of a style-conscious playboy with a more muscular physique.
“Is it just me, or is it hot outside?” Sanchez wrote in the caption of a 2023 Instagram post showing a shirtless Bezos in swimming trunks climbing the ladder of his $500 million mega yacht.
Before her relationship with Bezos, Sanchez, 55, was not a nationally known figure.
A third-generation Mexican American originally from New Mexico, Sanchez has dyslexia and has made awareness of the learning disability one of her missions.
She has shared that she assumed she was “stupid” until a community college professor informed her she had the condition and was perfectly smart.
“It changed my life,” helping her win a scholarship to the University of Southern California, Sanchez told the Wall Street Journal.
She dropped out of USC to begin her TV career at a local station in Phoenix, Arizona, before working on Fox Sports and Extra, a TV tabloid-style news show in Los Angeles, which would become her home for decades.
In 1999, she narrowly missed national fame when she was turned down for a spot on “The View,” the talk show hosted by TV news legend Barbara Walters.
Sanchez instead became a familiar face to Angelenos as a co-host of a local morning news show from 2011 to 2017.
During most of those years, she was married to Hollywood super-agent Patrick Whitesell, with whom she has two children, Evan and Ella.
She also has a first son, Nikko, from a relationship with former NFL star Tony Gonzalez.
Bezos has four children with his ex-wife: a son, Preston, born in 2000, as well as two sons and one adopted daughter whose ages and names are not public.
Sanchez has a deep passion for flying. After leaving morning television, she founded a company specializing in aerial filming and served as a consultant on Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk.
“This space is dominated by men,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “But there’s nothing physical about flying a helicopter... There’s no reason more women aren’t in this.” Her passion for the skies also led her to space in April as part of an all-female flight on Blue Origin, though the 11-minute trip has been criticized as wasteful.
Among the crew were pop singer Katy Perry, who was also a guest at Sanchez’s bachelorette party in Paris last month.
The A-list guest list for the party also included Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, and Eva Longoria.
AFP
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout