Almost two years after they got engaged, Jeff Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sanchez have finally put their plans for a wedding into place.
The pair announced they were getting married back in May 2023, when Amazon founder Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, gave his girlfriend a pink diamond ring so enormous she later said she ‘nearly blacked out’ when she saw it.
It’s apparently worth upwards of $2.5 million.
The happy couple threw an engagement party on his superyacht, Koru, that summer, inviting friends including tech billionaire Bill Gates, party-lover Leonardo DiCaprio and Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner.
Reports circulated that there was to be a ‘winter wonderland wedding’ in Aspen on December 28 last year, but the date came and went with no nuptials.
Now, a source close to the couple reveals that the wedding is very much still ‘on’ and will happen this summer, a little more than two years after Bezos popped the question.
Sources say Lauren Sanchez has already bought her wedding dress from Oscar de la Renta, which also designed her white bridal-style gown for this year’s post-Oscars party, above
A source says plans have been ‘inked in’ with invitations arriving imminently. And in terms of details, it is going to be ‘big’. Many believe it will be a destination wedding in Europe
Plans have been ‘inked in’, with invitations coming imminently. In terms of details, however, all I am told is that it is going to be ‘big’.
‘You won’t miss this one when it happens,’ says a source. Indeed — given the likely budget — it might well be the biggest celebrity party of the year.
Many believe it will be a destination wedding, somewhere in Europe, along the lines of Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes that took place in a castle in Rome, or at the fabled Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, near Nice, where Lionel Richie’s daughter Sofia got married in 2023.
Sanchez is friends with socialite Nicky Hilton Rothschild – who had her wedding at the Orangery in Kensington Place, London.
Sources say Sanchez has already bought her wedding dress from Oscar de la Renta. The New York-based fashion house was also chosen by actress Naomi Watts and George Clooney’s wife Amal for their weddings in 2023 and 2014 respectively.
In what is surely the prefect prelude to one of the world’s most lavish weddings, Sanchez will take a space flight on her fiance’s rocket in May.
She will blast off on the New Shepard — leading an all-female crew of six, including TV anchor Gayle King and pop star Katy Perry — for an 11-minute sub-orbital flight.
In November 2023, former TV host Sanchez shared that she will be taking the last name Bezos, saying: ‘Uh, yes, one hundred percent. I am looking forward to being Mrs Bezos.’
The pair are clearly besotted with each other. In one interview Sanchez gushed about Bezos: ‘He’s so happy, he inspires me every day. He makes me a better person every day. He’s the most loving human I know.’
While Bezos told CNN: ‘Lauren is the most generous, most big-hearted person that you would ever meet… She never misses a birthday. The network of people that she gives birthday presents to is gigantic. And that’s just a small example.
‘We’re really great teammates, and we also have a lot of fun together. And we love each other.’
Bezos, 61, was previously married to novelist MacKenzie Scott for 25 years. They had four children including Preston, who was born in 2000, as well as two more sons and a daughter they adopted from China. Bezos has never publicly revealed the names or birth dates of his three younger kids.
The couple officially split in 2019. It then emerged he had been romancing Sanchez, now 55, who was married to influential Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell at the time.
Princeton graduate Bezos is estimated to be worth $217 billion by Forbes. Some suggest the wedding was delayed by the need for a mega-prenup, but friends of Sanchez say that was not the case.
The pair announced they were getting married back in May 2023, when Amazon founder Bezos gave his girlfriend a pink diamond ring so enormous she later said she ‘nearly blacked out’ when she saw it. It’s apparently worth upwards of $2.5 million.
Sanchez celebrates her engagement with gal pals, including Kris Jenner (left)
Sanchez’s first engagement was said to be with sports broadcaster Rory Markas, whom she met while working at Fox Sports in LA. But the romance didn’t last.
There was also a relationship with NFL player Anthony Miller, followed by another with NFL star Tony Gonzalez, by whom she had her eldest son Nikko in 2001.
She and Gonzalez managed to stay good friends – he and his wife Tobie were the guests of Bezos and Sanchez at Thanksgiving in 2023.
She also had a liaison with LA Lakers player Derek Fisher and a minor entrée into showbusiness via actor Henry Simmons, to whom she was also reputedly engaged.
She apparently ditched Simmons after falling in love at first sight with handsome power-agent Patrick Whitesell in 2004.
‘I’d always ask my friends, “How do you know it’s the right one?”‘ she sighed. ‘Then when I met Patrick, I told them, “I so get it.”‘
In 2005, the year in which she and Whitesell married, her career when into turbo-drive after she landed a job as the host of Fox’s popular dance competition show So You Think You Can Dance.
Thanks to her Whitesell’s connections, her (first) wedding was a starry extravaganza. Guests included Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba and Hugh Jackman, who sang Mack the Knife.
Never backwards at coming forwards, Sanchez gave an interview to People magazine about the festivities, noting: ‘Matt [Damon] and Ben [Affleck] don’t get to see each other often, so we sat them together.’
Her job at So You Think You Can Dance ended after the first season, when she became pregnant with son Evan, now 18.
A friend from that time recalls that Fox was happy to give the role to British presenter Cat Deeley; Sanchez’s recollection was that she was ousted unjustly.
A source said: ‘Lauren was very smart, obviously very attractive not particularly knowledgeable in dance, but she would ask all the right questions. However, Lauren would not always pick up on what the answer was before moving on to the next question and that gave the impression of not listening, connecting or empathizing with the contestants.
‘It was a common mistake but rather strange with Lauren as she was a very warm, humorous and social person.’
The source adds that Deeley became available for Season Two and the team felt she was better suited to empathize with the young dancers, so Sanchez was replaced.
He daughter Ella, was born in 2008, and she returned to work as the weekend anchor and special correspondent on entertainment show Extra. She also worked on Good Day LA, a local morning news show, from 2011 to 2017.
Through those years there was always plenty of energy for her family as well as her career. Her son Nikko remembers that his extrovert mum would attend high school football games in self-made merch with his number on it and would ring a cowbell and cheer.
‘There was not a single year she wasn’t the team mom,’ he said.
In 2011 she got her certification as a helicopter pilot after a year of instruction. Her father Ray had been a flight instructor and a mechanic.
In 2016, having seen a commercial opportunity in her hobby, she formed Black Ops Aviation, specialising in aerial filming. Through her new gig, and thanks perhaps to connections via her agent husband, she consulted on Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk.
She told a magazine: ‘This space is dominated by men, but there’s nothing physical about flying a helicopter.’
By now she had met Bezos. Her husband represented the actress Michelle Williams and she was the star of the 2016 Amazon distributed film Manchester By The Sea. The two men apparently worked closely together.
Many believe it will be a destination wedding, somewhere in Europe, along the lines of Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes that took place in a castle in Rome, or at the fabled Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, near Nice, where Lionel Richie’s daughter Sofia got married in 2023.
In what is surely the prefect prelude to one of the world’s most lavish weddings, Sanchez will take a space flight on her fiance’s rocket in May.
At some point, a plan took shape for Sanchez and Bezos to work together on a documentary about his space project Blue Origin. This was described in the tabloids as ‘the $50 million alibi’.
The National Enquirer magazine trailed them across five states and 40,000 miles as they enjoyed private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star hotel hideaways and intimate dinner dates.
There were reports of red-hot texts and pictures.
When the news came out, Bezos announced the end of his marriage to Scott and Sanchez formerly split from Whitesell, although there were claims that both wronged spouses had been aware of the love affair for months and that, by the time it was exposed, all concerned had moved on.
Bezos gave his ex-wife Amazon shares worth more than $35 billion at the time, making her the third richest woman in world according to Forbes.
Sanchez’s two youngest, Evan and Ella, are shared on a week-on/week-off basis with Whitesell and, when parenting full-time, she lives in a gargantuan Los Angeles mansion, bought by Bezos from entertainment mogul David Geffen for $165 million in 2020.
There are also homes in Washington, where Bezos owns the Washington Post, Miami, Florida and an immense ranch in West Texas.
Sanchez says their lives are ‘pretty normal’ and ‘mostly revolve around the kids’. In the mornings, her coffee comes in a mug which reads: ‘Woke up sexy as hell again.’
She has a production company, Adventure & Fellowship, which is hoping to develop documentaries and features. She’s also written a children’s book The Fly That Flew.
But, as one half of one of the richest couples in the world, Sanchez now also has a busy philanthropic life.
They present the ‘Bezos Award for Courage and Civility’, which comes with a $100 million grant to be given to charities. Sanchez is the Vice Chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, which intends to spend $10 billion to try and solve the climate crisis. She is also involved in the Day 1 Families Fund, which helps homeless families, and the Bezos Academy, which provides tuition-free preschool education.
She told her friend Derek Blasberg at the Wall Street Journal: ‘Right now, I’m immersing myself in philanthropy and strategic giving. I’ve always had a career very separate from my partner. I think now that I can work with my partner and be with him all the time… We love to be together and we love to work together.
‘He’s helping me with the book. He’s getting his pilot’s license. We fly together. We work out together. We’re together all the time. Living with Jeff is like having a master class every day.’
Media mogul Barry Diller calls her ‘a sparkler in Jeff’s life’ and adds: ‘They’re very in love with each other – they’re demonstrably in love. She’s lit him up in the nicest ways. She’s a great stimulant.’