The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Taya Graham:

Not everyone was ready to throw congratulatory rice at the wedding of Amazon Tycoon, Jeff Bezos and journalist slash socialite Lauren Sanchez, who was back fresh from her 11 minutes in heaven. I mean outer space. 200 or so famous guests, including Oprah Winfrey and Jared Kushner have been expected to descend on the island. City and Venetians are generally not excited. They’ve taken to the streets and protest hanging a gigantic banner that reads no space for Bezos. On the Rialto Ridge, one activist Federica Elli says that the wedding would be a symbol of the exploitation of the city by outsiders. And another vowed we’ll make sure they choke on their wedding cake. The Venetians are not here to play, but it’s important to note we recorded this video before the actual wedding and the couple has attempted to keep details of the event quiet. So I can’t predict exactly what will go down, but activists say they’re planning to prevent guests from reaching the event in a few ways, including jumping into the canals to block water taxis and obstructing Venice’s famously narrow streets.

And of course, my favorite filling the canals with inflatable alligators, which is just objectively very creative. But however the saga plays out, we think the controversial lead up to the event reveals a lot of righteous anger at how the elite treat our world as their personal playground while the rest of us pay the price. Just for one quick example, 50 of the world’s wealthiest billionaires will produce more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in 90 minutes than the average person does in their lifetime according to NGO. Oxfam incidentally, some protests sign ahead of the wedding. Red Venice land a playground for an oligarch with Bezos. We see a flippant decision to use his vast resources and influence to largely take over Venice for his three day wedding celebration. Never mind how the locals feel about it. This is emblematic of how Bezos has built his empire by exploitation and strong arming like his wedding.

His mind boggling wealth is intrinsically made possible by the profound structural inequality that defines our times. But back to the party initially intended to be a $600 million affair in Aspen, Colorado, Bezos and Sanchez decided to downsize to a reported $10 million Italian affair. This was apparently in response to the bad press over the girl power theme space Flight Sanchez took on one of Bezos’s blue origin rockets accompanied by pop star Katy Perry, among other gal pals. Now Bezos’s own mere four minute flight back in 2021 apparently cost around $5.5 billion. That just so happens to be enough to save 375 million people from starvation. But we hope he enjoyed his trip. According to one guest, the couple decide to go a little less. Marie Antoinette in the hopes of registering better optics. When a $10 million wedding sounds like keeping things casual, I can confirm you are no longer visiting outer space.

You are living there in the runup to the Grand Event, Sanchez held an ostentatious Parisian bachelorette party that cost a whopping $670,000. Reportedly Kim Kardashian, Chris Jenner and Ava Longoria were part of her bachelorette. Her pink diamond engagement ring worth $3 million was on full display as she wield an $8,000 Eiffel Tower shaped purse. Very on theme, but life is no cakewalk for the world’s third richest man’s bride to be. She’s apparently also been busy procuring 27 Italian designer dresses in anticipation of the three day wedding. And yes, your math is right, that rounds out to nine dresses a day. The sickening display of massive wealth is perhaps best represented by Bezos’s $500 million, 417 foot long three masted super yacht called Koru, which may or may not dock in Venice. For the celebration, the largest sailing yacht in the world, Koru requires a support yacht which hosts the helipad presumably.

So Jeff Bezos feet never have to touch the humble ground. It’s among many luxury vessels that made Dock and Venice, a city whose infrastructure has already been greatly damaged by gigantic cruise ships. So it’s no surprise that activists ranging from an anti cruise ship committee to housing advocacy groups have united in opposition to the event. For them, it’s the perfect symbol of everything going wrong with their beloved island, which the Venetian Council for Tourism calls a dying city. They’re not eager to share their historic homeland with celebrities like Chris Jenner and Mick Jagger because they doubt they’ll feel much benefit in return and feel the event will upset the normal functioning of their community and they’re right to be irate. Bezos hasn’t built his $229 billion empire by being generous to us. Common folk designer Diane Vum. Furstenberg told the Italian press that she had suggested Bezos give a donation to the cast trapp city as a message of gratitude.

And Venetian politicians wrote him an open letter urging him to contribute to restoring the city’s crumbling infrastructure. At the time of this video, Bezos had apparently done no such thing, which is fitting for a man who has made an art out of evading any obligation to the public good. And I truly mean any obligation by keeping his official Amazon salary artificially low and claiming scores of hefty losses in investments. The billionaire mogul managed to pay zero, literally $0 in federal income tax in 2007 and 2011. And this guy even had the gall to claim a $4,000 child tax credit in the latter year between 2006 and 2018. Bezos’s Wealth grew by a whopping $127 billion, yet he paid a true tax rate of 1.1% on his fortune. The average American’s income tax rate is 14.5% and Bezos is still at it. After the state of Washington instituted a 7% tax rate on stock exchanges in 2022, Bezos stopped selling off his Amazon stocks, which he’d been doing at a steady rate for over two decades.

Quickly, he officially moved to Florida where no such tax exists and promptly resume selling stocks. A strategy expected to save him an estimated $610 million in taxes. Along the way, he acquired two mansions on an exclusive Miami Island known as Billionaire Bunker. So I guess that means Bezos’s richest neighbor is actually just himself. Despite the mogul’s refusal to contribute his share or any share at all to the public good, Venetian politicians have spoken enthusiastically about the event and the expected revenue it will bring to the island. They’ve equally expressed annoyance towards protesters who have argued that his revenue will only benefit luxury businesses and hotels rather than ordinary Venetians. Although people close to the couple told AP news that the couple will be sourcing 80% of wedding provisions from Venetian vendors. The outlet only identified two businesses involved a luxury glassware company and a historic pastry company with a catering service in five locations.

It’s not exactly humble salt of the earth stuff going on here, but still the Venice Counselor Director General bragged to the London Times that he actively campaigned for the privilege of hosting the event. Even deputizing Dominic Dolce of the controversial ban, Dolce and Cabana, and incidentally Sanchez and Bezos were spotted having a wedding fitting at the Milan Dolce and Cabana store. See, Bezos is no stranger to being feted by iconic cities for the privilege of his presence. In 2018, during the excruciatingly drawn out public process of selecting a new city for Amazon’s second headquarters, locations competing locales offered Bezos more than $22 billion in tax credits, including my own city of Baltimore. Chicago’s proposed tax credits alone could have funded a year’s worth of public school education for nearly 150,000 students. But who needs math class when you can Amazon a calculator with same day shipping?

Ultimately, Arlington, Virginia won with a sweet offer of $750 million in taxpayer subsidies. In exchange, Amazon promised to add 25,000 jobs by the end of 2020, but in just its second year of operation, Amazon was already instituting layoffs among local workers. The company has vowed that it will meet the 25,000 job goal by 2038. See, bringing Jeff Bezos to your city is rarely the boon you expect it to be, especially for the average resident apparently ahead of the wedding. Bezos specifically booked hotels that are international chains, not owned by Venetians, where local staff work for a minimum wage of seven euros an hour. Of course, this couldn’t bother Bezos, who’s been dubbed the world’s worst boss by the International Trade Union Federation. Condition in Amazon warehouses are famously atrocious, defined by impossible quotas and grueling manual labor. One North Carolina Amazon warehouse worker told Oxfam, it’s so bad I have to psych myself up and pray to go to work, adding stress to already difficult work.

Amazon has mainstreamed constant surveillance to keep tabs on workers’ individual metrics. 53% of workers say they feel a sense of being watched always, if not most of the time, while 58% say their pace is actively ranked. And compared to their coworkers 45% report not being able to take breaks due to the high pressure. It’s no wonder that stories about water bottles fold with urine have become depressing. Company lower. The results of this high stress environment are predictable and tragic. In 2021, New York Amazon Warehouse reported nearly 20 injuries of the most serious kind for every 100 workers. And the following year, injury rates across Amazon warehouses were nearly double that of all other warehouse jobs. In 2023, the Department of Labor charged Amazon with exposing workers to unsafe working conditions, resulting in high rates of low back injuries and other musculoskeletal disorders among workers that same year.

Amnesty International reported that migrant workers at an Amazon warehouse in Saudi Arabia suffered horrific housing and working conditions, which practically speaking amounted to human trafficking. And Amazon risk assessment from 2021 proves that Amazon knew of the high likelihood of abuse in the country, but went ahead with the operation anyway. Amidst this widespread mistreatment, Amazon workers have consistently tried to unionize and order to demand better conditions, and Amazon has responded with aggression. In 2022, Amazon allocated a full $14.2 million to anti-union consultants. I mean, we don’t know for certain what these consultants suggested, but we do know that the following year a judge on the National Labor Relations Board ruled that supervisors at Amazon had threatened workers trying to unionize saying they’d withhold their wages and benefits if they voted in favor of the motion. To be clear, this is patently illegal. Amazon tactics to destroy worker solidarity have included fire union organizers creating anti-union propaganda, and I kid you not hiring the private Investigation Agency Pinkerton to spy on those trying to organize their fellow warehouse workers for their part.

Venetian tourism workers have been equally eager to fight oppressive working conditions. They just haven’t faced quite as many barriers to having their voices heard as we’ve had here in the US Last year, three unions representing over 100,000 Venetian hotel workers went on strike over the meager below poverty wages they received. While working at luxury hotel chains like the Hilton and Star Hotels, they accused their employers of using stonewalling tactics to deny workers’ demands for a higher minimum wage for nearly a decade, despite the rampant inflation plaguing Venice. While Venice is the most expensive city in Italy to stay in a hotel, its workers are struggling just to get by. Doesn’t that sound familiar? And that’s what makes this whole spectacle so irritating because imperfect parallel Bezos is unimaginable wealth funding. The nuptials is only made possible by exploiting and underpaying his workers. In 2024, Amazon reported record profits of $15.3 billion.

Meanwhile, the majority of the company’s warehouse workers experienced food insecurity during a three month period in 2024 while nearly half experienced housing insecurity and 56% were unable to pay all their bills. According to a University of Illinois study, presumably the working and living conditions of Amazon employees will not be on anyone’s mind during the leisurely three day wedding celebration. But based upon recent averages, bezos’s personal fortune, which grows $8 million an hour, can be expected to balloon to nearly $600 million over the course of those 72 hours. Just as Bezos’s party benefits wealthy Venice hotels while failing to trickle down to its workers, Bezos is only able to afford this wedding in the first place because he built his fortune on the literally broken backs of his workers. Now, politicians have insisted that regardless of Venetian’s feelings about Bezos, their are normal lives will be undisturbed by the event.

But activists argue that the wedding which is liable to be disruptive is actually most low sum because it embodies the way Venice increasingly caters to rich visitors while neglecting its dwindling population of residents. This is part of a broader overt tourism concern plaguing Europe. In Venice, housing prices have skyrocketed. As much of the city dwellings have been converted into Airbnbs leading to massive housing shortages for full-time residents. The shortage is exacerbated by the city’s crumbling infrastructure, which is further strained and destroyed by overt tourism. It’s so bad that the United Nations education and science culture organization has twice considered deeming the island a heritage site in imminent danger of total destruction. Meanwhile, the city’s increased reliance on tourism keeps most of its residents working in the industry doing precarious labor subject to seasonal fluctuations and shocks in global economics.

This calls to mind the way Amazon’s own proliferation changed its home city of Seattle, which according to one Gawker writer back in 2015, always represented possibility and prosperity until Amazon swallowed it. The company bought up a historic low rent neighborhood and converted it into a corporate campus that spreads blight in all directions. The result worse, traffic, longer hours, higher cost of living, greater income inequality, and lower quality of life. Venetians might count themselves lucky that Bezos’s Empire is only invading their island for a few days, but during those days, the lavishness of the celebration will greatly contrast greatly with the lived realities of most Venetians, who due to overt tourism, have seen housing opportunities as well as resources like hospitals and nursery schools evaporate. But judging from how Bezos runs his company and with it much of the world’s economy, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll give much thought to the plight of the average Venetian, as he says I do. But congrats to the happy couple. I hope you’ll take a moment in the comments to let me know if you’d liked me doing a deep dive on these oligarchs that are running our country and the world’s economy. I have a few more billionaires I want to investigate in depth 813 to be exact in order to truly understand their impact on our lives and our futures. And I hope you’ll join me. I’m Taya Graham, your inequality watchdog reporting for you. Take care.