"No Space for Bezos": Why Jeff Bezos’s $10M Venice Wedding Is Being Protested
"We will block the canals, line the streets with our bodies..."
Updated June 18 2025, 1:29 p.m. ET
Amid his vanity space exploration missions and horrifying details that have emerged over the years regarding the treatment of Amazon employees, it's very easy to understand why so many people are fed up with billionaire Jeff Bezos.
With details emerging that Bezos is planning to marry journalist Lauren Sanchez across several Venetian locations in June, the city's local residents are expressing their immense dissatisfaction over the news and protesting the nuptials.
Understandably, Venetians are upset with the hullabaloo surrounding the wedding, and as more details are revealed about the locations of the wedding, protestors are given more ammo to display their frustrations.
Below, we discuss the details of the forthcoming Bezos wedding, why Venetians are so angry, and what protestors are doing to showcase their anger.
Jeff Bezos's wedding was protested in Venice in June 2025.
According to CNN, angry, fed-up, and "underemployed Venetian young people" gathered to protest at multiple sites where billionaire Jeff Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez plan to celebrate their forthcoming wedding. A blue banner that read "No Space for Bezos,” replete with a mocking spaceship, was hung over "the foot of Venice’s Rialto bridge."
On the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, protestors further expressed their frustrations with the Bezos wedding and its multiple locations by proudly displaying a "No Bezos" sign at the island's bell tower, per CNN.
The protestors are seeking to fulfill their mission of blocking, delaying, and ultimately preventing the Bezos-Sanchez wedding and takeover of their beloved city.
“Bezos will never get to the Misericordia,” protest organizer Federica Toninello said of the expected site of the actual wedding ceremony, per CNN. “We will block the canals, line the streets with our bodies, block the canals with inflatables, dinghies, boats.”
“Let’s make sure that Venice is not remembered as a postcard venue where Bezos had his wedding but as the city that did not bend to oligarchs,” protestor Na Haby Stella Faye added. “We can’t miss a chance to disrupt [this] wedding.”
Venetian tourism is often seen as "coring out local communities to the advantage of incoming visitors. And now the city of canals, Venice, has seen its waters futher troubled by the upcoming marriage of Amazon boss and billionnaire Jeff Bezos, with inhabitants furious over what they see as the privatisation of their home," according to FRANCE 24 English on YouTube.
How much, then, will the Bezos-Sanchez wedding cost, injecting money into the city but alienating locals at the same time?
What is the cost of the Bezos wedding?
CNN estimates the wedding cost alone at approximately $10 million, and the frustration that Venetians feel over their city's being taken over does not stop there. According to the New York Post, the couple will dock their $500 million superyacht just outside of Venice, where the wedding is expected to take place.
Brides reports that the $10 million price tag is comprised of approximately $50,000 per person for a guest list of about 200 people, including the Kardashians. As Page Six Radio reports, the newlyweds and their guests will stay at the Aman Venice and the Gritti Palace, which both cost about $500,000 per night.