With Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez set to marry — spectacularly, controversially — Friday in Venice, comparisons with the original “tech bro” wedding some 30 years ago show just how much Big Tech has grown in both wealth and power.

Bill Gates’ wedding, on the Hawaiian island of Lanai on New Year’s Day 1994, was considered a lavish display of the success and prestige of the co-founder of Microsoft who was then America’s second-richest man.

Next to the Bezos-Sánchez wedding, those extravagances look quaint.

Where Gates and fiancée Melinda French opted for the relative seclusion of an exclusive resort on a private island, Bezos and Sánchez chose one of Europe’s most popular tourist cities at peak season.

The Gates-French guest list was impressive, certainly, in a '90s, pre-social media sort of way. It included Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and investor Warren Buffett, then the world’s richest human, among many others, according to The Seattle Times. Country singer Willie Nelson performed for the couple's New Year's party.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen brought his 154-foot superyacht, Charade, on which the newlyweds reportedly honeymooned.

But that’s minor league compared to the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" caliber of the Bezos-Sánchez invitees.

The list reportedly includes President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, Katy Perry, Oprah and two Kardashians, according to media reports, along with, of course, the current publisher of The Washington Post — Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013.

Other guests have arrived on superyachts that make Allen’s look like a dinghy. These reportedly include Michael Jordan’s 244-foot M’Brace and Pakistani American businessman Shahid Khan’s 400-foot Kismet. (Bezos left his own floating mansion, the 417-foot Koru, in nearby Croatia.)

The most telling contrast, though, may be the change in individual net worth.

In early 1994, Gates qualified as America’s second-richest person thanks to a fortune estimated at nearly $7 billion, just behind Buffet, with around $8 billion. Adjusting for inflation, Gates' fortune back then would be around $15 billion today.

Today, those fortunes would be rounding errors when compared against the current wealth of Jeff Bezos, who, as of February, was the second richest man in the world, behind Elon Musk, with an estimated $264 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Gates, meanwhile, is now ranked as the 14th richest man on the planet, with $106 billion.

Indeed, in nearly every way, the two weddings illustrate the vast differences not only between the two tech moguls, but the very different place that the tech industry itself has come to occupy in the hierarchy of global culture, politics and power.

It also underscores more recent changes for Bezos, who transformed himself from a bookish Bellevue business guru into a Florida-based jet-setter surrounded by the world's famous and powerful.

Seattle split

Bezos’ wedding serves as another milestone in his post-Amazon, post-Seattle life. The founder of the tech giant moved to the Seattle area in 1994 and started the company out of his garage in Bellevue. He stepped down from Amazon as CEO in 2021, and two years later officially left Seattle for Florida.

“I’ve lived in Seattle longer than I’ve lived anywhere else and have so many amazing memories here,” Bezos said in a November 2023 social media post announcing his move to the Miami area, where he grew up.

Despite Seattle always having a piece of his heart, Bezos’ increasingly loose ties to the city draw a stark contrast to Gates, with whom he’s often contrasted.

Bezos, who originally hails from Albuquerque, N.M., doesn’t share the Pacific Northwest roots of other Seattle-based founders like Gates and the late Paul Allen. Gates departed for Harvard College but eventually found his way back to the Puget Sound, bringing Microsoft along with him from, ironically, Albuquerque. Gates also split from his longtime wife, Melinda French Gates, but unlike Bezos he stayed put in the Northwest with a home on the Eastside and property on the Hood Canal.

Bezos’ Venice wedding punctuates his fraying connections to Seattle.

Just over six years ago he was married to a woman he lived with in Seattle for 25 years. He was leading the state’s largest employer and owned several homes on the Eastside. He’s now divorced from MacKenzie Scott, decoupled from Amazon’s day-to-day operations and selling pieces from his Puget Sound real estate portfolio.

The guest list for Bezos’ and Sánchez's wedding wasn't disclosed, but is hardly secret. Among the voluminous reports, of varying veracity, the only recognizable representative from the Seattle area so far is current Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Compare that with Gates inviting guests like former Washington Gov. Dan Evans. There’s no word and zero evidence Bezos invited the most recent former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

Different from the first

Bezos’ first wedding to MacKenzie Scott was likely lavish, though however much money was spent pales in comparison to his upcoming nuptials.

Bezos, then 30, married Scott, a 23-year-old Princeton graduate then known as MacKenzie Tuttle, in 1993 at the Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The pair wed less than a year after they first met at D.E. Shaw, a New York hedge fund where Bezos was a senior vice president and Scott was an administrative assistant. She fell in love with his laugh, she told Vogue in 2012, and he found her “resourceful, smart, brainy and hot.” Plus he had seen her résumé so he knew her SAT scores.

Their wedding drew little fanfare at the Breakers, a luxury beach resort that also hosted the weddings of Sofia Vergara and Joe Manganiello in 2015, and Rush Limbaugh and Kathryn Rogers in 2010.

The wedding had a game time for its adult guests and an after-party in the hotel pool, according to “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone.

Soon after, the couple headed west.

How do Washington weddings stack up?

To the surprise of no one, the Bezos-Sánchez wedding will be decidedly un-Seattle.

A kickoff event was scheduled to take place Thursday night in a gothic church dedicated to St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers. On Friday, guests will celebrate at a second party on the island of San Giorgio, where Benedictine monks once prayed. The festivities culminate on Saturday in the halls of the Venetian Arsenal, the heart of the city’s once-formidable naval and shipping industries.

It’s all a far cry from the archetypal Washington wedding, which tends to be more rooted in a reverence for nature. Think: Moss and the mountains, water and the woods.

“A lot of people just love the Pacific Northwest, so they want to be able to have that unique outdoor wedding,” said Jelena Krzeszowski, owner of planning company JBK Weddings and Events. There’s particularly strong demand for a breathtaking vista, she said, be it of the Cascades or the Puget Sound.

The Amazon founder’s wedding will be a stark contrast in a much more obvious way: Cost.

While an official budget for the nuptials hasn’t been shared, the president of Italy's Veneto region, whose capital is Venice, told reporters earlier this week that they were expected to cost between $46.5 million and $55.6 million.

For the rest of us: The average cost of a wedding in Seattle now hovers around $31,320, according to spending data collected by popular wedding planning website the Knot. Though not Bezos-level, the figure is also nothing to scoff at, representing about a quarter of the city’s median annual household income.

And it might keep climbing. Industry experts note that wedding costs have risen rapidly over the past five years, with no signs of stopping. An inflation crisis, local minimum wage hikes and high demand in the wake of the pandemic all drove prices unrelentingly up. Ongoing trade wars and tariff threats could push them even higher.

In other words: For those of us who can’t make it to Venice, fear not. You, too, can spend an arm and a leg planning a wedding, and you can do it right at home.

The Venice freeze?

Fleets of megayachts. A-list celebrities and tastemakers. Rented out hotels.

None of it has gone over well in Venice.

Earlier in the week, the wedding drew protests from about a dozen organizations. Greenpeace activists unfurled a prominent banner that read “IF YOU CAN RENT VENICE FOR YOUR WEDDING YOU CAN PAY MORE TAX” with an image of Bezos cackling below the text. Greenpeace is advocating for a global tax on the uber wealthy to fund green measures.

Groups staging the protests include housing advocates, anti-cruise ship campaigners and university groups, The Associated Press reported.

“Bezos is not a Hollywood actor,’’ activist Tommaso Cacciari told The Associated Press, referencing the warm welcome George Clooney received during his wedding in Venice in 2014. “He is an ultra-billionaire who sat next to Donald Trump during the inauguration, who contributed to his reelection and is contributing in a direct and heavy way to this new global obscurantism.”

Activists under the group name No Space for Bezos reportedly claimed a victory, forcing the couple to switch venues for a post-vows reception party from a historic building in central Venice to an area of renovated shipyards on the edge of the city known as the Arsenale.

Bezos’ wedding isn’t the first time his vast wealth on display has angered European residents.

One of his yachts, the $500 million Koru, caused a stir in 2022 after it was built in the Netherlands. To get the ship out to sea, the city of Rotterdam was going to have to dismantle a historic bridge that was lower than the ship’s masts.

After outcry from citizens and an online campaign to egg the yacht as it passed by, the ship’s builder towed it out of the country without the masts.

By the time the ship arrived in Port Everglades, Florida, it was too large to anchor with other private yachts and was instead tied up with commercial oil tankers and cargo ships.

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