Money may not be able to buy you taste, but it sure can get you close to it.
The price of a ticket to the Met Gala for 2026 is $100,000, which is up 33% since last year’s price of $75,000. For context, an annual salary of $100,00 now provides Americans with the same kind of lifestyle that $80,000 would have given just a decade ago. In the same reality, Amazon workers have been organizing for weeks ahead of the Met Gala to advocate for its boycott.
Posters titled “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala” have popped up across NYC, highlighting Amazon's ruthless worker exploitation and collaboration with ICE. A notable display right in front of the Met Gala carpet showed a sign titled “Met Gala VIP toilet” which said it was “installed in honor of Met Gala chair Jeff Bezos” with a basket of empty water bottles because, the sign reasoned, “it’s good enough for his staff”. Combined with horrific workplaces with worsening labor rights, Amazon workers take home a median pay of about $37,000 as of 2025-2026, if they even make it home.
The Met Gala has been criticized for years for its invitees’ extravagant parading of their opulence and riches, but what happened this year?
Jeff Bezos, along with his wife Lauren Sánchez, stepping into the roles as co-chairs of the Met Gala—roles which they paid at least $10 million for—is just the latest move to assert influence and dominance in practically every aspect of American life by bleeding Amazon’s workers dry. It’s not a secret why Amazon workers are protesting this move. In fact, the reasons have been extensively documented. Amazon warehouse workers are twice as likely to be seriously injured than workers at other warehouses. Half of Amazon warehouse workers are reliant on public assistance programs like Snap and Medicaid as they struggle to make ends meet. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s 2026 investigation found that Amazon violated the worker rights of disabled and pregnant workers by denying medical accommodations and forcing unpaid leave. Warehouse staff routinely face intense pressure during peak production periods for Amazon, leading to thousands of workers suffering from musculoskeletal disorders and other preventable workplace injuries.
Workers have responded to Amazon’s inhumane conditions by organizing for better conditions and pay, to which Amazon has retaliated with aggressive union busting. Amazon spent at least $26 million on firms that specialize in anti-labor organizing and union-busting techniques, according to the company’s 2025 filings with the U.S. Labor Department. And they paid good money for the consultancy for a reason. Amazon has flooded its warehouses with anti-union flyers in bathrooms and breakrooms, which workers could come across after their mandatory meetings with disinformation about unions. In fact, Jefferson County spokeswoman Helen Hayes asserts that the county sped up the red lights near Amazon’s fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama at the company’s behest, making it harder for union organizers to engage with employees and drivers at the traffic median.
Amazon’s worker treatment is not the only reason for the protest of Bezos and the Met Gala by association. The Met Gala’s lead sponsor has consistently supported ICE in their efforts to target minorities and terrorize vulnerable communities. According to the Immigrant Defense Project, Amazon Web Services supports the Department of Homeland Security via its cloud storage services. By being the primary broker of cloud storage for the DHS, the company allows ICE to collect information on immigrants and their communities to ultimately surveil and track people for deportation. And the environmental impact of these data centers? Just a few weeks ago, Amazon was to pay $20.5 million in a settlement over nitrate pollution from their data center facilities contaminating the groundwater in Morrow County in northeast Oregon.
Vogue’s former editor-in-chief Anna Wintour said on her 2017 appearance on The Late Late Show with James Corden that she would never invite Donald Trump back to the Met Gala. But what does it mean when the Founder of Amazon—which contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund—is now a co-chair at the Met Gala, which Anna Wintour runs?
And what does a tech billionaire, who is rich off of the world’s largest e-commerce and cloud computing company, want with the world of luxury fashion anyways? For the longest time, Silicon Valley built its ethos on its rejection of art, taste, and beauty by refusing to consider style, artistic principles, and visual aesthetics. The tech world prided itself on its focus on function and utility over an appreciation for the arts, which would translate into a maintained distance from the humanities as a whole.
But as the tech industry has gained its current reputation as being empty and soulless, especially with tech companies sapping consumers’ privacy and money more and more every day, it is in dire need of a PR facelift. And what has the strategy been? Palantir has been cosplaying as a lifestyle brand selling apparel and tote bags. Zuckerberg even had a seat at this year’s Met Gala, a night that is dedicated to celebrating creativity and supporting the arts.
But these billionaires only care about the arts to the extent to which their support can launder their reputations.
Days after the Met Gala, Meta is discontinuing end-to-end encryption of Instagram direct messages. Palantir has a contract with the IDF to provide AI-driven data analysis software for use in Gaza. All of this is what the Met Gala has served to obscure by being associated with Bezos, which is what he gains for contributing so heavily towards. Artists and creatives receive his monetary support, especially at a time when the increasing cost of living is crushing Americans nationwide, but only if they can ignore the structural violence of Amazon’s empire.
The Met Gala has effectively legitimized him culturally, and others like him, in the eyes of the public. A public that is waking up to the violence being perpetuated by tech companies and the billionaires that benefit from them.
This is not to imply that union-busting and practices are mutually exclusive from the Met Gala itself, either. Ahead of the 2026 Met Gala, unionized workers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art posted that 91% of the museum’s hourly staff and 27% of salaried staff earn less than a living wage.
Condé Nast, the primary organizer and media partner for the Met Gala, has been accused of engaging in retaliatory and anti-union behavior. The union, Condé United, which is affiliated with the NewsGuild of New York, states that Condé Nast fired four union leaders and suspended others after a confrontation with the company’s HR over the layoffs and closure of Teen Vogue. Teen Vogue was known for its youth-focused political coverage, and its closure marked another hit to candid reporting at a time when hard-hitting journalism is needed most, while newspapers all over the country close.
Fashion, and the arts as a whole, has always sought to encapsulate and represent the human experience. But after depleting natural capital by polluting our water and exhausting human capital by working employees to death, Amazon and other tech giants are now coming for cultural capital as a way to validate their existence in our society.
An existence that they’ve built by betraying every facet of the social contract, when at the very least, they could pay their share in taxes.
If our understanding of what it means to be human is going to be shaped by tech companies’ money in arenas such as fashion, what does that say about our sense of humanity?
