Jeff Bezos at the Met Gala: Extreme wealth’s big night out - CNN

The annual Met Gala, which takes place this year on Monday, May 4, is always a lightning rod for controversy. Was Karl Lagerfeld too problematic to serve as a 2023 theme? Was TikTok, which had just been deemed a national security threat by the US government, an appropriate sponsor for 2024’s gala? And just how small can designers make Kim Kardashian’s waist? (This one comes up almost yearly.) But the 2026 gala, celebrating the accompanying exhibition, “Costume Art,” that gathers examples of clothed bodies from across the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curatorial departments, has proven especially contentious. Elected amid growing public anxiety over income inequality, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced he will skip the A-list gathering. “My focus is also on affordability and making the most expensive city in the United States affordable, and that’s what I’m looking to spend a lot of my time focused on,” he told news site Hell Gate last month. Then there is the matter of the evening’s sponsors. While fashion brands or tech behemoths like Instagram typically underwrite the affair, this year Amazon co-founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos, and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, are the event’s main benefactors. They are also honorary chairs. (Co-chairs Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Vogue’s Anna Wintour remain the official hosts, while Saint Laurent is sponsoring the exhibition catalog.) After the Met announced the Bezoses’ participation, many social media users — who are the Met Gala’s most enthusiastic promoters, tuning into Vogue’s livestream and analyzing looks for days afterwards — called for a boycott. This has materialized as actual protests from groups including Everyone Hates Elon (as in Musk), which over the past few weeks has papered New York City with posters also urging a boycott. “The Bezos Met Gala: Brought to you by worker exploitation,” reads one, in reference to the allegations of labor violations that have long swirled around Amazon’s e-commerce business. The recurring criticism has not stopped the gala from raising enormous funds: last year, it brought in a record $31 million. (By contrast, the New York Philharmonic’s Opening Gala raised $3.3 million in 2025.) Max Hollein, the museum’s director and chief executive officer, said he saw the Met Gala as part of “the history of American philanthropy,” where people across the political spectrum support culture and other causes. “Right now, maybe there’s an added layer of scrutiny, an added layer of attention to that,” he said. “But we will always be grateful for that support from various different sources.” The Met Gala is the primary fundraiser for the Met’s Costume Institute, which houses over 33,000 objects spanning seven centuries. (It is oft-repeated that the Costume Institute is the only museum department that raises its own funds, although that is not accurate; every department receives money from the museum’s overall operational budget, and supplements that with fundraising.) The gala’s funds support acquisitions of garments and accessories, but also the institute’s reference library, which holds over 800 periodicals and 1,500 designer files pertaining to the history of fashion and clothing, dating back to the sixteenth century. The funds also support a conservation lab and storage space, as well as the Costume Institute’s gallery spaces, including the 4,300-square-foot Anna Wintour Costume Center and the brand-new nearly 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast Galleries. Salaries for its 29-person staff also come from gala funds. The new galleries, located just off the museum’s Great Hall, will allow the Costume Institute’s exhibitions to remain open for much longer, increasing the reach and scope of the department’s shows. “It is one of the greatest collections of fashion, of costumes,” Hollein said. Preservation and storage are “more challenging, more expensive” than for drawings or paintings, he said. “I think it’s really important for people to understand, when we talk about the Met Gala, the money really goes into preserving this collection.” It is the presence of bold-faced names and the sheer amounts of money surrounding the event that seem to court the most controversy. Over the past two decades, Wintour has helped transform the party from an archetypal charity benefit into a celebrity-fueled phenomenon — an effort that has led to bigger and bigger ambitions for the museum, alongside ever-increasing ticket prices for gala attendees. Individual tickets are priced at $100,000 for 2026, while a table sells for $350,000, and guests must be invited by the museum to buy tickets. The perception that the event is tone-deaf means that critics are eager to pounce and cry hypocrisy when, say, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wears a dress that reads “Tax the Rich” (as she did in 2021). Last year, Kennedy heir (and former Met Gala attendee) Jack Schlossberg, who is now mounting a congressional campaign in Manhattan, called for a boycott of the event in an Instagram post, citing “so much happening around the world and at home.” (The post has since been deleted.) For most, it is not the museum that warrants criticism, but the involvement of the Bezoses. On the morning of the gala, a group of organizations including the Service Employees International Union, the Strategic Organizing Center and the Amazon Labor Union will stage a Ball Without Billionaires, a fashion show in downtown New York in which workers from businesses including Amazon, Whole Foods and The Washington Post (all linked to Bezos) as well as Starbucks and Uber will serve as models, wearing clothes by ethically-minded designers. “If there is that money to sponsor this gala, there should also be money to pay the workers fairly,” said Cindy Castro, a New York-based designer who immigrated to the US from Ecuador, and whose pieces will appear at Monday’s event. “I want to raise awareness about our safety issues that we’re having in the Amazon warehouses,” said April Watson, an employee at an Amazon Warehouse in northeast Georgia who will model in Monday’s show. She said that she and her fellow workers are pressured to pick and pack at faster and faster rates, receiving warnings that can lead to termination when their pace falls in the bottom 5%. “When I try to work fast with very heavy items, it’s easy for me to do too much, and it has led me to be injured.” She continued, “I want to do what I can to help there be systemic change that would make the warehouse safer for employees like myself.” In a statement to CNN, an Amazon spokesperson said of their warehouse worker expectations, “Safety is our top priority and at the core of everything we do. Amazon does not have fixed quotas at our facilities. Instead, we assess performance based on safe and achievable expectations and take into account time and tenure, peer performance, and adherence to safe work practices.” This is not Bezos’s first time as the Met Gala’s honorary chair. In 2012, Amazon sponsored the gala and the tech titan held the honorific, posing with the likes of Wintour, Miuccia Prada and Carey Mulligan. While Watson was not working at Amazon then (she joined the company in 2021), she said, “My perception of him was different.” Back then, Bezos was worth an estimated $18.4 billion, according to Forbes, which made him the 26th richest person in the world. Now, he’s worth an estimated $224 billion, and ranks fourth. These days, Watson said, “Jeff Bezos seems almost like royalty. He is so wealthy, and I know that he is the one that started Amazon – he’s very creative, and he’s a good organizer. He built it. And now I feel like he’s celebrating his success and just not interested in us who are at this bottom tier.” The Bezoses’ recent high-profile outings — including a splashy wedding in Venice and a series of appearances at Paris Couture Week in January — have also made the gap between their lifestyle and that of most others more apparent. That has made them a more visible target, too. And yet, without their support, this year’s Met Gala — and its promotion of fashion as an art form, and of the notion that celebrities can craft a narrative through clothing that entertains us or even helps us better understand our world — may have been more modest in scale. “What is important is that you need to evaluate the integrity of the institution, the profoundness of our program, and the proper use that is being applied for these funds,” said Hollein. What the Bezoses are providing funds for, he said, are the museum and Costume Institute’s ethos and initiatives, not a donor’s personal agenda. “This is not a show on Amazon. This is not a show on Lauren Sánchez’s dresses. One needs to be really clear that what our donors are supporting is the program of the Met, and the ideas of our curators, and the integrity of the institution,” he said. “And they don’t want to have it any other way. That’s exactly the donors that we want, and those are the donors that museums like ours need to have.” Wintour told CNN in late 2025 that Sánchez Bezos would be “a wonderful asset to the museum and the event,” calling her a “great lover of costume and obviously of fashion.” Indeed, it is because of the Costume Institute and Met Gala that so many see fashion as they do today. Hollstein pointed to last year’s show on Black dandyism, for example, or this year’s, which will highlight “not only the dialogue between different arts about the dressed body, but different body types.” A museum, after all, is not a donors’ playground, but a place for the world to access art. “I always wanted to see the Met museum. I love art,” Watson said. “Museums in general allow ordinary people — anyone — to come in and see, face to face, these priceless pieces of art.”