Lauren Sánchez on Going to Space, Giving Back, and Her High-Flying Romance With Jeff Bezos
“Our lives are pretty normal,” she says.
Exclusive! Inside Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos’s Beverly Hills Engagement Party
Hosted at the home of Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, the party welcomed Oprah Winfrey, Salma Hayek Pinault, Barbra Streisand, Kris Jenner, Sarah Staudinger, Robert Pattinson, Suki Waterhouse, Miranda Kerr, and more.
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Much has been made of Bezos’s evolution from round-shouldered online bookseller to Tony Stark titan of industry and the third richest man in the world. Once insular and press-shy, he formed a tight cocoon around Amazon, his then wife, MacKenzie, and their four children in Seattle. Now it’s as if he’s emerged from his chrysalis, a swole monarch, no longer Amazon CEO (a role he ceded in 2021) but an empty nester who is venturing not only into the Adriatic but into outer space. Sánchez, by all accounts, is the perfect partner for all of it—unbridled in her enthusiasm (seven people I spoke to described her as a “force”) but also socially adept, attentive, a diplomat of a kind. “Lauren has amazing intuition, almost witchy powers in that regard,” says Bezos. “She sees things that other people don’t see. She’s really very sensitive to other people and what they’re thinking.”
“She’s a sparkler in Jeff’s life,” says Barry Diller, who with his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, are two of Bezos’s closest friends and will host a second engagement party for the couple at their home in Beverly Hills. “They’re very in love with each other—they’re demonstrably in love,” he adds. “She’s lit him up in the nicest ways. She’s a great stimulant.”
“Since she’s been with Jeff, she is more peaceful and more calm. She appears more herself,” says her sister, Elena Sánchez Blair, sounding a note I heard often: that Sánchez is delighted by her new life but resolutely the person she’s always been—trained on her family and those she loves. “You see her, this beautiful force all done up in ball gowns, but the truth is most of the time we are on the couch in sweats and yoga pants, playing Sloppy Dice or Heads Up on our phones,” Sánchez Blair tells me.
Sánchez clearly adores the more extroverted Bezos. “He’s the life of the party,” she says happily. “He’s just extremely enthusiastic, and extremely funny. He can be really goofy. I mean, you’ve heard him laugh, right?”
I hear this laugh often, in fact. Bezos guffaws when I ask if he will get involved with wedding planning: “Oh, God, no. Do I look that dumb?”
“We’re still thinking about the wedding,” says Sánchez, “what it’s going to be. Is it going to be big? Is it going to be overseas? We don’t know yet. We’ve only been engaged five months!” He proposed at the start of their summer at sea, hiding the ring under her pillow after a starlit dinner à deux. She found it at bedtime, her makeup off. “When he opened the box, I think I blacked out a bit,” she tells me.
Will she be taking his name? She looks at me like I am insane. “Uh, yes, one hundred percent. I am looking forward to being Mrs. Bezos.”
As to the responsibilities that come with being married to one of the richest men in the world? She pauses, careful: “I think there are a lot of opportunities that come with that, and I take those opportunities very seriously. We always look at each other and go, ‘We’re the team.’ So everything’s shared.”
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