Congrats to Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez on the wedding – and to Venice for running them out of town | Emma Brockes

People power forced a change of venue, proving that a man worth 223bn can still fall foul of ordinary folk with pool floats

There are so many questions swirling around the forthcoming wedding of Jeff Bezos to Lauren Sanchez this weekend - for instance, who in their right mind books Venice in high summer? Why isn't Katy Perry going? And how is Eva Longoria still on every guest list, despite not having been famous since 2012? - but the one I keep sticking on in this: as the world's third richest man, Bezos could, we assume, charm almost any woman on the planet into some sort of marital arrangement with him. In which case, and with all due respect, why Sanchez?

I don't mean this to be as rude at it sounds. Lauren Sanchez, a 55-year-old former TV presenter and licensed pilot, is, I'm sure, funny and clever and up there with Peter Ustinov as a great dinner party guest. Her betrothed, on the other hand, doesn't appear to be a man comfortable with making anything but the most obvious choices. Bezos got rich, built a rocket, and turned himself from a weedy tech nerd into a comic-book Mr Universe so that these days he looks like a man wearing an Amazon cardboard box under his polo shirt. That this person would choose not only a woman a mere six years younger than himself but one who, stylistically speaking, edges closer every year to the Jocelyne Wildenstein school of bizarre beautification speaks either to the loveliness of a genuine soul match or something else altogether.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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