At this year’s Met Gala, a new trend is taking shape: blowback against billionaires.
From a video projected onto a nine-figure Manhattan pied-a-terre to social posts directed to Anna Wintour, protesters are staging stunts and counterprogramming in opposition to fashion’s biggest night, and some insiders are boycotting the event, which is sponsored by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos.
The outcry is a symptom of a broader frustration with extreme wealth.
As billionaire wealth balloons — the billionaire set was worth a collective $15.8 trillion last year, up 13% from 2024, according to a report by Swiss bank UBS — the public seems more eager to hate on billionaires.
A 2025 survey conducted by The Harris Poll found that 47% of respondents said they “despise billionaires,” up eight percentage points from 2024. A majority of respondents also said they think we celebrate billionaires too much in our culture, and they blame billionaires for “creating more of an unfair society.”
The results can be seen in policy, with the California billionaire tax officially garnering enough signatures to make the November ballot, and in the election of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, who broke with tradition by not attending the Met Gala.
And, on the ground, activist groups like Everyone Hates Elon are spreading the message. Over the past year, the group has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch campaigns deriding billionaires at events like the Davos World Economic Forum and Bezos’ Venice wedding.
The guerilla activists are behind the video projected on Bezos’ penthouse on Sunday night, featuring a 72-year-old Amazon worker named Mary.
“When we struggle from paycheck to paycheck, from week to week, it really angers me, because if it weren’t for every associate in every Amazon facility, he wouldn’t have all those zeros behind his name,” she said in the protest piece. “Enjoy your damn gala.”
A new kind of drama on the Met Gala carpet
Since the February announcement that Sánchez Bezos and Bezos would be lead sponsors and honorary chairs of this year’s Met Gala, there was backlash on social media.
While tech companies like TikTok and Apple have sponsored the gala before and billionaires like Bezos and Musk have walked the carpet, this is the first time a tech billionaire has been named as an honorary chair, affording them the famous photo opportunity on the steps of the Met next to Anna Wintour.
In the month leading up to the Met Gala, social posts around the event and Bezos and Sánchez Bezos reflected 70% unfavorable sentiment and 6% favorable sentiment, according to social intelligence firm PeakMetrics, which analyzed posts across X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, and Bluesky.
The posts paint the couple as “symbolic figures representing the penetration of wealth into cultural institutions” and focus on economic inequality, Jennifer Pratt, PeakMetric’s director of marketing and communications, told Business Insider. Photos of Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg at recent fashion shows sparked a similar reaction.
There have also been 13,000 posts on X calling for a boycott of the event because of the Bezos’ involvement, PeakMetrics found, namely by not tuning into coverage or purchasing Vogue.
Bezos and Sánchez Bezos did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The backlash is largely targeting the Bezoses. Other billionaires involved in the event, including cochair Beyoncé, have not received the same level of pushback.
In March, Everyone Hates Elon, which also organized a protest in Venice around Bezos and Sánchez Bezos’ wedding, launched its initiative “ruin” the Met Gala for Bezos and “Trump’s Billionaires,” which raised more than $22,000. In addition to the Amazon worker video, they plastered posters around the city, hid hundreds of small bottles filled with yellow liquid — a nod to Amazon workers who said they urinate in bottles — inside the museum, and installed empty plastic bottles outside the building with a sign reading, “good enough for his staff.”
Separately, a group of Amazon workers put on a fashion show, called the “Ball Without Billionaires,” on Monday afternoon as Met Gala counterprogramming, and protesters gathered near the event, holding signs lambasting billionaires and letters spelling “tax the rich.”
The criticism is also coming from inside the fashion house.
Livia Giuggioli Firth, a sustainable fashion advocate who has attended 10 Met Galas, posted an Instagram video directed at Wintour, criticizing her for bringing Bezos and Sánchez Bezos into the fold and describing him as “one of the most unethical people in the world.”
“You chose to side on this line of history, which says the empire is really strong, and alive, and kicking, and tonight you will see the biggest manifestation of that,” she said in the video, referring to Bezos and his support of Trump. “It’s the Hunger Games scenes. They wear costumes there, too.”
Actor Taraji P. Henson, who has attended the event in years past, commented on a video criticizing the Met’s ties to Bezos with clapping emojis, saying she was “confused by some of the ppl that are going.”
Online, those who support Bezos’ involvement are quick to point out that the event does not, at least financially, benefit billionaires or the famous couple. The money raised — a record $42 million — goes to the Met’s Costume Institute. The museum declined to comment on the backlash or how much the party, which the sponsors cover, costs.
And as much as people hate billionaires, that doesn’t mean they don’t aspire to be one someday. When asked, 70% of respondents in The Harris Poll survey said they wanted to become a billionaire.
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