I’ve been watching Jeff Bezos float deeper into his own irony-sodden oblivion…
From a creaking Dutch boarding house, stitched together with love, oddity, and the faded dreams of creatives, I’ve been watching Jeff Bezos float deeper into his own irony-sodden oblivion.
Here at Le Domaine du Meunier, an ex-mill reborn by the mad brilliance of Ariane van Tuyll and her husband Coen, two Amsterdam visionaries who clearly value soul over spectacle, everything breathes with human touch. Pinball machines hum, lotus flowers grow in tubs of water in the garden, paint peels with dignity. It’s a home that embraces imperfection, a refuge from the algorithmic tyranny of the present. And it stands in delicious contrast to the grotesque pantomime of the Bezos-Sanchez wedding.
What is this circus, if not a masterclass in reputational deafness? Wounding noise. A plutocratic theme park for the surgically enhanced and spiritually bankrupt. The richest man on earth hosting a Marie Antoinette cosplay in a city already choking on cruise ships and protest banners. Let them eat cake? Bezos baked the whole bastard thing and served it with a drone.
This isn’t love it’s ego theatre. Bad theatre. Self-directed. No irony. No second act.
Jeff once sold us convenience. Now he’s selling us decadence. And the most galling part? He thinks we’re buying it. That anyone beyond the velvet rope is watching this ghastly tableau and thinking, “Goals.”
What he doesn’t see—what he can’t see from inside his bulletproof, Botox-laminated bubble is that the world is groaning under the weight of his symbolism. He doesn’t hear the groans. He hears applause. He’s mistaking gasps for admiration.
Bezos didn’t just build a yacht too big for its harbour. He built a lifestyle too tonedeaf for its times. This isn’t just rich. It’s dystopian slapstick. A tech bro in white linen, mugging for the cameras, as the city hosting him begs for air and dignity.
And as for Sanchez the puppet master of this operatic nonsense well, no one’s fooled. Bezos was never this peacock before she appeared. Now he’s a glistening spectacle in love with his own press release.
Where I sit now, in this beautiful analogue madhouse overlooking the Gironde estuary, I’m reminded of a time when eccentricity wasn’t monetised, and creativity wasn’t a commodity. Where have all the Ariane and Coens gone? The beautiful misfits who lived by instinct not influence, who knew that life was meant to be felt, not flaunted?
Bezos lives in a bubble. And like all bubbles, it will pop.
