Previously: Scott Mills’ sacking: What’s in a statement?
On the track ‘Rap Snitch Knishes’ from his 2004 album MM.. FOOD, the late great MF DOOM castigated rappers who boast about their own real-life crimes in their rhymes:
Rap snitches, tellin' all their business Sit in the court and be their own star witness "Do you see the perpetrator?" Yeah, I'm right here Fuck around, get the whole label sent up for years
When it comes to the uber-rich, they’re often so detached from reality that it’s not hard to turn them into star witnesses for the prosecution simply by quoting their words accurately. My first response to reading this weekend’s New York Times profile of Lauren Sánchez Bezos, the second wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was to bristle at its very existence. The headline and standfirst are pure rage bait:
Someone Has to Be Happy. Why Not Lauren Sánchez Bezos?
As half of an unfathomably powerful couple, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos seems to have influenced the uber-rich to stop apologizing, and start enjoying themselves.
But I quickly realised that the writer, Amy Chozick — whose last major profile for the NYT was a much-criticised 2023 sit-down with disgraced Theranos-founder-turned-jailbird, Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Holmes — was engaged in allowing Sánchez Bezos to hang herself with a rope woven from her own quotes.
There’s a modern tendency to demand that writers explicitly tell the reader what they think of their subject; is this a goodie or a baddie we’re dealing with here? In opening the profile, Chozick makes it clear we are in a ‘let them eat cake’ situation without the need to give any indication of her own emotions. Consider the desert dry humour at work in this first paragraph:
A lot of things make Lauren Sánchez Bezos ridiculously happy. Helicopters. Fashion. Protecting the narwhal. Her little sister, Elena. Her five best girlfriends. And, of course, her new husband, Jeff Bezos.
Of course, dissecting a joke is like cutting up a live frog and then expecting it to still hop, but there’s a dark laugh underneath the first three items in that list: Helicopters. Fashion. Protecting the narwhal. And then we come to the white whale of the piece, the big beast whose existence justifies the obsession — Jeff Bezos himself.
The straightforwardness of the prose maintains deniability for Chozick. She’s not mocking Bezos and Sánchez Bezos when she details their morning routine; she’s just faithfully recounting what she was told:
[The couple] do everything together. On a typical day, the newlyweds wake up around 6 in their new, roughly $230 million compound on Indian Creek, an exclusive private island in Miami often called “Billionaire Bunker.” They don’t touch their phones. Instead, they begin each day by listing 10 things they’re grateful for — and they can’t repeat what they named the day before.
From there, the couple drink their morning coffee in a sunroom and watch the sun rise: hers from a mug that reads “Woke Up Sexy as Hell Again,” his from one she got him that spells HUNK in symbols from the periodic table. They play pickleball. Six days a week, they work out for an hour with a private trainer. “He looks good, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said of her new husband, in an interview in Miami in January. She slow-nodded, repeating, “He looks good.”
Each detail adds another crease to the cringe. It’s a billionaire bride’s desperate attempt to make the most abnormal lifestyle seem relatable.
In her description of the metamorphosis of Jeff Bezos from tech nerd to muscle bro, Chozick deploys another sharply ordered list:
Now, he is gym-hardened, frequently shirtless, captured mid-laugh in paparazzi photos, canoodling on his megayacht, a man who has discovered joy, love and cosmetic dermatology.
“… and cosmetic dermatology.” You don’t need to see the eyeroll to be certain of its existence. You can practically hear it like billiard balls in motion.
The choice of examples is key. They reveal a person who sees profundity in what most would identify as utterly mundane:
Mr. Bezos, the world’s third-richest man, relies on her advice on nearly everything — and vice versa. For instance, in early March, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos published her second children’s book, “The Fly Who Flew Under the Sea,” about Flynn, a dyslexic fly whose wrong turn leads to an undersea adventure. Mr. Bezos edited the book, suggesting a change to the illustrated submarine on the cover. “He said it should be fantastical, not realistic,” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. “Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I don’t.” She changed it.
Who among us can say that sometimes we listen to advice and sometimes we don’t? It’s the kind of exceptionally sharp thinking that’s only available to the elite.
The plausible deniability that runs through the profile turns it into a kind of Rorschach blot for tone. If you want to believe that Chozick is being sincere, it’s quite possible to read it that way, but if you choose to detect sarcasm, the ink is certainly smeared in that direction:
Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, 56, adores kids. Having them. Raising them. Encouraging other people to have them. Over several interviews, she repeatedly urged me to have another baby. “Do it!” she said. “I would have another one tomorrow. Tomorrow.” I finally asked if she and Mr. Bezos were considering it, as a couple of her friends had suggested to me. “I would have a baby tomorrow,” she repeated, with a coy smile. (A spokeswoman later called to say Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was not having a baby.)
But honestly, why not? Mrs. Sánchez Bezos has shown that with the right attitude and mind-boggling wealth, anything is possible. Space travel. The Met Gala. Fertility after 50.
When the writer gets to the staggering grotesqueness of the Bezos Sánchez wedding — an amphibious invasion of Venice that took place in June 2025 — she puts distance on the criticism…
To some, it was a tone-deaf display of staggering wealth at a time of historic inequality.
… before immediately swerving to Sánchez Bezos’ description of the day:
[She] gets choked up talking about what the public didn’t see: the toasts by all their children; the high school friends of Mr. Bezos’ whom nobody bothered to photograph. Phones were banned from the ceremony and reception. But “no NDAs!” Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said, referring to nondisclosure agreements. “They’re our friends! And you did not see one picture come out of that wedding.”
The profile’s central conceit is that the American ultra-rich used to at least pretend not to have it all (“…they projected austerity or stayed largely out of the limelight.”) and that Sánchez Bezos is an exemplar of the trend towards “unabashed rich-person exuberance”. I think that’s patently bollocks — the obscenely wealthy have always leaned into the obscene bit — but hey, the article needed a hook.
After a fleeting summary of Bezos’ somewhat adversarial relationship with Trump in the president’s first term and his abrupt switch to cosy inauguration-attending, government-contract-acquiring pal in his second, Chozick tries to probe Sánchez Bezos on politics:
When I asked her opinion of Mr. Trump, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos, who is breezy and agile at pivoting back to the fun topics, waved me off. “I am not talking politics,” she said. “No, no, no, no, no. No way.”
People close to Mrs. Sánchez Bezos often argue that it’s not fair to criticize her for her husband’s political and business decisions. The frequent refrain is, “What does that have to do with Lauren?” But that is the downside to being a conjoined organism to a master of the universe: It all has to do with you.
That phrase “conjoined organism to a master of the universe” is a sudden outbreak of spiky edges in a series of smooth sentences. While Chozick presents most criticism in the padding of “some argue” and “critics say”, shrapnel is embedded throughout.
In January, the couple made the couture rounds in Paris. Mrs. Sánchez Bezos was dripping in vintage Dior with fur and diamonds. She stepped out of a chauffeured Mercedes in a blood-red Schiaparelli skirt suit alongside Anna Wintour. The trip happened to coincide with an announcement that Amazon planned to lay off 16,000 employees.
That juxtaposition is nicely done, as is the decision to note the colour of the skirt suit.
The constant criticism wears on her, Mrs. Sánchez Bezos said. “I can never imagine writing something mean on somebody’s Instagram,” she added. “It would actually break my heart. I want positive: You look great. You’re amazing. I want to just give everyone flowers. Why wouldn’t you?”
Placing Sánchez Bezos’ hyper-rich hippie response directly after a quote calling her “capitalism’s concubine” is very effective. It highlights the toxic quality beneath that greeting card positivity. “Why wouldn’t you?” Perhaps because you might not simply want to be happy for people hoarding the world’s resources. Similarly, the following use of anonymous sources is perfect:
Several friends of the couple told me the same thing: If they had been married back then, Mr. Bezos never would have bought a newspaper. He would have bought an N.F.L. team. Like a normal billionaire.
Like. A. Normal. Billionaire. As if there’s any such thing.
Chozick also does a good job of dissecting the process of reporting out the celebrity profile. As she describes a helicopter trip with Sánchez Bezos, she notes, “if there’s one thing she wants people to know, it’s that she is a helicopter pilot” before pointing out that “it’s also a bit of a press strategy for her: She took a Vogue reporter on a trip like this one, too”. That 2023 Vogue profile by the magazine’s editor Chloé Malle was effectively a promo for Bezos’ space ship company Blue Origin, with Sánchez Bezos slinking around its West Texas facility in couture.
Inevitably, Chozick’s profile compares Sánchez Bezos’ philanthropy — that fancy word we have for the rich doling out cash while minimising their tax paying — with that of Bezos’ first wife, MacKenzie Scott:
Ms. Scott seems to be following in the grand tradition of the American uber-rich who burnished their reputations via noblesse oblige, established in our last Gilded Age of Carnegies and Rockefellers. Their descendants have continued the mission.
Mr. Bezos and Mrs. Sánchez Bezos can seem more allied with the rising class of billionaires who, frustrated with the glacial pace of nonprofits, want to improve the world with privately funded ventures, like their space company or their A.I. explorations.
Chozick continues later in the piece:
Fairly or not, [Sánchez Bezos] is often compared with Ms. Scott — bookish, private and almost defiantly out of the spotlight. Whereas Mrs. Sánchez Bezos embraces philanthropy, but also the pleasure that comes with wealth — the visibility, the proximity to power, the fashion, the fun.
She is fluent in fame. But power is a whole other language, especially as one half of a couple whose reach rivals that of a nation-state. She wants to spread happiness into every room she enters, but happiness can’t scale. Happiness can’t pay the rent.
This is where the profile loses me a little. That second paragraph is a prime example of where a writer is pleased with their phrase-making but hasn’t pushed harder to think about what it actually means or to get their subject to talk about that idea. The reader is told that Sánchez Bezos “does not traffic in cynicism,” but we need a much larger portion of it here.
In the comments below the online version of the profile, Chozick writes:
My favorite type of profile is the study of a woman caught in a media firestorm — where public fascination meets private reality, and the snark and projection that follows. This piece allowed me to look past the red-hot glare to ask: what do we actually know? And what does our reaction reveal about our own thoughts regarding women, wealth, power, and sexuality?
While it’s interesting to hear directly from the writer about their intentions in putting together a piece, I don’t quite believe that it’s about getting beyond the snark. There’s plenty of snark baked into the writing, just as I’ve said, combined with large helpings of plausible deniability. The power of this kind of profile and this one in particular is in letting the facts about and the quotes from the subject do the hard work. Sánchez Bezos may not “traffic in cynicism”, but most of us do.
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