Choose Your Overlord
T he Adriatic has been crossed by Odysseus and Caesar, by Venetian fleets and Napoleon’s navy, by countless men bent on dominating the world.
It has seen its share of courage and folly.
But one day in June 2025, off the island of Cres, it witnessed something genuinely new: a man worth $240 billion standing waist-deep in bubbles on the deck of a $500 million yacht, wearing a white bucket hat.
The man is Jeff Bezos, and the woman photographed in the string bikini next to him—hugging him, rubbing him with bubbles—is his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez.
Bezos is shirtless, and it must be said: He is ripped.
His hairless torso is so buff, his expression so amused, that he looks more like a louche cartoon character—a Club Med Ninja Turtle—than a 61-year-old corporate executive.
In the foreground, an anonymous crew member, his face hidden from view and his thoughts forever unknown, mans a cannon blasting bubbles into the Croatian sky.
The foam party was a birthday celebration for Sánchez’s 19-year-old son, a prelude to the Bezos-Sánchez wedding five days later in Venice—with 200 VIP guests, hundreds of protesters, and an estimated cost of $50 million.
The wedding consumed the internet for a week and was treated as a self-contained cultural event, a thing worth interrogating or gawking at on its own terms.
In fact it was the culmination of one of the weirder decades that any American billionaire has ever had.
The whole republic, to be fair, has been pretty nuts, and Bezos has been both caught up in the insanity and an agent of its acceleration.
In 2013, Bezos, who founded Amazon and still owns roughly 8 percent of the company, purchased The Washington Post for $250 million .
Two years later, Donald Trump accused him of using the paper as a tax shelter, to which Bezos jokingly responded that Trump should be launched into space.
Trump then said at a rally, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems.” Trump became president, and the Pentagon steered a massive cloud-computing contract away from Amazon Web Services, while Trump repeatedly pressured the U.S.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theatlantic.com — the content belongs to The Atlantic.
