Jeff Bezos Is Not A Cowboy

I swear this picture could give you a disease

I’m sorry for showing you this picture. Not sorry enough to not show it to you, but trust me, I hate it just as much as you do. I can barely even write this newsletter I’m so nauseous. However, I am a blue-collar writer just trying to get a full day’s work in at the blogging mines, so I’m going to put my head down and get out this content. Might as well stick around to see what comes out.

For those of my newsletter letter readers who are blissfully unaware of the world around you, this is a picture of Jeff Bezos, once the world’s richest man, and his fiancée Lauren Sánchez. This photo was taken as part of a November 2023 Vogue photoshoot.

If you’re wondering what all the kerfuffle is about, that is not what Jeff Bezos looks like. He looks like this.

Or this.

I’ve written about similar photos in this very newsletter. Namely that photo of Tom Brady and Tony Dungy.  You can see it below. You remember. Another nightmare photo. My thesis about the Brady/Dungy photo was basically that it was incredible that two millionaires allowed a picture this bad to be taken of themselves. The Bezos photo affords me the opportunity to test that thesis with an even richer person. It passed with flying colors. “Cowboy Bezos” proves that money certainly does not buy class, and in fact, may show that being one of the richest people in the world just destroys all sense of what is beautiful and cool in this world.

I don’t want to make it seem as if this is something new that I’m uncovering. People have been talking about it forever. One of my favorite looks at the inability of mega-rich people to be classy or cool comes from an under-the-radar show called The Other Two. The Other Two follows the two older siblings of a child star. One of the siblings, Brooke, has a bit where she dates a millionaire who, due to the stock market going up or whatever, becomes a billionaire. In the world of the show, the second that the person she’s dating becomes a billionaire he gets plastic surgery and his personality switches into something completely unbearable. Bezos is that billionaire.

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With so much concrete data available about the tendencies of billionaires it's unsurprising that Bezos and Sánchez let this photo get out into the world. Make no mistake, if Bezos didn’t want this photo to exist, it would not exist. This photo was reviewed by a minimum of a hundred people before it was posted, including Bezos and Sánchez, and it was still put on Instagram. That means that one of the richest people in the history of the planet Earth thought this photo looked badass. I guess cowboy hats are officially over.

Also, re the Other Two example. I’m not saying that Jeff Bezos has had plastic surgery. I am not a surgical expert and I certainly do not want to get sued by him. But I’m also saying that Bezos used to look like this.

Maybe it’s just all Photoshop. Those biceps are certainly popping in that Vogue photo.

All of that is just aesthetics. Aesthetics are important but they are not everything. The complaints against Bezos are many, varied, and most critically, based on fact. Bezos, via his company Amazon, has consistently skirted/broken labor law, supported anti-union drives, and made billions of dollars off of his employees. That’s saying it very nicely. Like VERY nicely. It’s Thanksgiving and I’m trying to keep my vitriol levels low. But yeah, this photo is also terrible for other reasons too.

Back to the aesthetic stuff. Let’s break down this photo element by element. I’ll start with the background. I guess this is supposed to be sort of a nebulous “Western”-scape? Like the imagery in the video for Kanye’s “Bound 2,” but way more bland? Boring ass-Renaissance lighting in the clouds. The clouds can’t even figure out if they’re all vertical or all horizontal. Editors at these big magazines always choose either Route 66 or Kennedy-esque stuff when they want to depict “Americana.” Go with something new. If Bezos had an ounce of irony left in his body, he would have done a Roaring Twenties/Gilded Age/Robber Baron thing, but he lacks any artistic vision at all so we end up with a weirdly lit skyscape. This isn’t even like the most gorgeous scenery America has to offer. The Western US is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Arches, Zion, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Glacier, and a million other places all conjure up images of the American West, and yet Bezos and the Vogue crew decided on “flat scrub-core.” You’ve got an unlimited budget and yet it looks like this was shot on a soundstage. Damn.

Alright, let’s move on to the people. Clearly, Bezos is going for some type of Cormac McCarthy No Country For Old Men tough guy vibe. The giant bicep, the tight black shirt, the vintage car, his partner draped across him, it’s a whole thing. I’m surprised there’s not a hunting rifle to be found anywhere in the image. And make no mistake, this photo is about Bezos. While Sánchez’s face might be front and center, it’s Bezos who doesn’t have to contort his body to get all of himself in the photo. He’s literally in the driver’s seat. Don’t have to do any graduate-level textual analysis to understand that.

This is more of a side note, but that yellow paint on the body of the car is fully wild to me. It’s probably just whatever filter they used in Photoshop, but it looks so bad. I have nothing against yellow as a color, or even against a nice vintage truck being painted yellow, but that shade is really bugging me out. It looks like a sick sunflower. Not sick in a cool way. Sick in an “I’m dying of consumption” way.

The thing about all that tough guy stuff is that it's total dress-up stuff, like when Donald Trump gets to go into a big truck and make the horn go beep-beep. Bezos is a sales guy. He’s not some badass cowboy. That is nowhere in his life at all, except I guess that he lives in America, and place that only had cowboys for like twenty years, decades before he was born. This is a playdate he had with his fiancée that for some reason he wanted the whole world to see. True billionaire brain.

Sorry, I made everyone look at that photo. Here’s a nice photo to make up for it.

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