Why Are Tech Bros and Billionaires Infiltrating Creative Spaces?

Because they understand that politics and policy are shaped by culture, and cultural clout is power.

This is going to be a quick run-through of the key points I wanted to highlight about the Met Gala. I genuinely do not want to invest more than the bare minimum of my energy into the tech bros and billionaires who have infiltrated every space and taken so much from us already. I refuse to give them even more of my attention on top of everything else they’ve taken.

You have all the money in the world, your workers are pissing in the plastic bottles to meet the productivity quota, you fund ICE, you enrich yourself from the genocide; can you at least get the fuck out of our sight?

Lauren Sanchez-Bezos did a Met presser on Monday afternoon and said she’s grateful to be there and: “The Met has always understood something the rest of the world is finally catching up to: fashion is art.” Where do you go from here? What did we expect, allowing billionaires to pay their way into creative spaces?

Tech bros and billionaires infiltrated The Met, Art Basel, Coachella, Burning Man, Sundance, Tribeca — why are they doing this? These people have never been interested in art or creativity of any kind; that’s precisely why they are who they are — people who exploit, not people who create. They’re nerds with money, and money cannot buy cultural relevance. That’s why they keep trying to purchase it.

Why is it so important to them to be cool? Is it just an attempt to make up for what they never were in adolescence? No. Don’t be fooled by that notion. They understand very well that art is political. That culture is political. They understand that politics and policy are shaped by culture. They understand that to shape policy, you need cultural clout, and for that, you need to be cool.

The person who lets his workers piss in plastic bottles to meet their high productivity quotas will never, ever be someone with genuine cultural clout. He has to buy it. And I blame Anna Wintour for letting him do it. The gatekeepers of art are the ones allowing people like Jeff Bezos into creative spaces.

Anna Vintour lost all the killer instincts that made her who she is, and she should step down and retire.

And Bezos? $10 million for The Met, $70 million for Melania’s Funniest Home Videos, sorry — movie; in his deranged mind, he thinks he’s motherfucking Medici.

And the wife with the Madame X inspired dress, a Schiaparelli that looked like Amazon Prime Fashion on her? It takes a special skill to make Schiaparelli look like a cheap prom dress instead of wearable art.

If I thought even slightly better of these people, I would say that, by choosing that specific dress — an homage to a famous painting by John Singer Sargent, fitting for a Costume Art theme — they were being self-aware, making a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of their place in today’s cultural climate. Instead, I think the reference Lauren Sanchez chose to replicate is an unintentional reflection of what Bezoses represents today, and what Madame X represented in 1884 — using art to force your way into creative spaces you do not belong in, and into cultural relevance you have not earned.

Yes, museums need money, but not at this cost. People are dying all over the planet. Freedoms are being stripped away at home. Museum funding is simply not that important at a time like this, when the current wealth gap is larger than it was before the French Revolution.

At this moment, the wealth gap is larger than in pre-revolutionary France. Per Save The Planet Society, globally, the top 1% is now holding 30.4% ($46.18 trillion) of global wealth, while the bottom 50% holds only 2.5%. In the U.S., the top 0.1% saw their share of wealth grow from 8.7% in 1989 to 13.9% in 2024, and it widens every day.

Tech billionaires are not people who achieved the American dream by simply working harder than everyone else. They are not success stories. They are unethical hoarders of wealth with political agendas, and they need cultural events like the Met Gala to whitewash their image.

Culture shapes the political agenda. Why are people on the right, along with Zionists across the political spectrum, so afraid of Hasan Piker and constantly trying to cancel him? Because Hasan has enormous cultural power, and the people who oppose him know he can move crowds toward his political views. Cultural relevance is an extremely powerful political tool.

This image, posted by Everything is Political in a piece by Louis Pisano, perfectly captures this year’s Met Gala and the deeply distorted image of the billionaire class it revealed — something straight out of a slasher film.

Photograph by Matthew Johnson / Everything is Political