Activists from the U.K. action group Everyone Hates Elon and Greenpeace Italy unfolded a banner reading, “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax,” on Piazza San Marco in the Italian city on June 23, 2025. (Photo: Michele Lapini/Greenpeace)
“This isn’t just about one person—it’s about changing the rules so no billionaire can dodge responsibility, anywhere,” said one Greenpeace campaigner.
Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—the third- or fourth-richest person on the planet, depending on the list—is hosting various wedding events in Venice, Italy, this week, festivities that have drawn protests, including a massive banner on Monday.
Activists with Greenpeace Italy and the U.K. action group Everyone Hates Elon—targeting Elon Musk, U.S. President Donald Trump’s close far-right ally and the wealthiest person on Earth—unfolded a banner that read, “If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax,” in Piazza San Marco.
“While Venice is sinking under the weight of the climate crisis, billionaires are partying like there is no tomorrow on their megayachts,” Greenpeace campaigner Clara Thompson said in a statement. “This isn’t just about one person—it’s about changing the rules so no billionaire can dodge responsibility, anywhere.”
“The real issue is a broken system that lets billionaires skip out on their fair share of taxes while everyone else is left to foot the bill,” she argued. “That’s why we need fair, inclusive tax rules, and they must be written at the U.N.”
Jeff Bezos pays his staff poverty wages and dodges tax. No wonder he can afford to shut down half of Venice for his wedding this week. Tax billionaires NOW.Location: Piazza San Marco, Venice@greenpeace.org #JeffBezos #TaxTheSuperRich
Reporting on Monday’s display of the banner—which features Bezos’ face and is about 65 feet long and wide—Reuters detailed:
Local police arrived to talk to activists and check their identification documents, before they rolled up their banner.
“The problem is not the wedding, the problem is the system. We think that one big billionaire can’t rent a city for his pleasure,” Simona Abbate, one of the protesters, told Reuters.
A spokesperson from Everyone Hates Elon similarly said in a Monday statement that “as governments talk about hard choices and struggle to fund public services, Jeff Bezos can afford to shut down half a city for days on end just to get married.”
“Just weeks ago, he spent millions on an 11-minute space trip,” the spokesperson added, referring to the Blue Origin flight for multiple public figures, including Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sánchez. “If there was ever a sign billionaires like Bezos should pay wealth taxes, it’s this.”
Bezos and Sánchez’s event planners, Lanza and Baucina, toldCNN: “Rumors of ‘taking over’ the city are entirely false and diametrically opposed to our goals and to reality… From the outset, instructions from our client and our own guiding principles were abundantly clear: the minimizing of any disruption to the city.”
The details surrounding Bezos’ marriage to the former news anchor have been closely guarded, but CNN reported that around 30 of Venice’s 280 water taxis are thought to be reserved, the city’s nine yacht ports are booked, and one source said that special permission has been granted for private helicopters.
While Venice’s mayor and regional governor Luca Zaia have defended the billionaire’s luxury wedding events, citing economic benefits for local businesses, “the ‘No Space for Bezos’ movement—a play on words also referring to the bride’s recent space flight—has united a dozen Venetian organizations including housing advocates, anti-cruise ship campaigners, and university groups,” according toThe Associated Press.
The Bloomberg and Forbes lists tracking global billionaires put Bezos’ net worth between $223.4 billion and $231 billion as of Monday. At times in recent years, he has been believed to be the richest person in the world.
Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Priscilla Chan, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attend President Donald Trump’s inaugural ceremony on January 20, 2025. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Families including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg now control a combined $2.6 trillion in wealth, according to renowned economist Gabriel Zucman.
A new analysis by a leading chronicler of the United States’ exploding inequality shows that the 19 richest American households added $1 trillion to their collective fortunes last year and saw their share of the nation’s wealth jump at a record-shattering pace.
The analysis by Gabriel Zucman, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that the 19 wealthiest U.S. families now control 1.8%—or $2.6 trillion—of the nation’s total household wealth.
In 2024, those ultrarich households saw the largest single-year wealth increase on record.
The Wall Street Journal noted in its Wednesday write-up of Zucman’s analysis—based on data from Forbes, Fortune, and the Federal Reserve—that the families in his “research on the top 0.00001% in the U.S. are worth at least $45 billion per household and include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and private-equity investor Stephen Schwarzman.”
Their wealth is largely tied up in the U.S. stock market, which rose more than 23% in 2024. The richest 10% of U.S. households control 93% of stock market wealth, according to the Federal Reserve.
(Source: Gabriel Zucman via The Wall Street Journal)
Zucman, whose analysis dates back to 1913, told the Journal that the U.S. has recently seen a “dramatic acceleration in the rise of the share of wealth owned by the truly superwealthy”—a trend that would continue if President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress pass tax legislation largely benefiting the rich.
“There is a strong anti-oligarchic current in America, and it has a formidable champion,” Zucman added. “Fight!”
The Journal reported Wednesday that “a household in the top 0.1%—roughly 133,000 households each worth at least $46.3 million—accumulated an average of $3.4 million a year since the third quarter of 1990, in 2024 dollars.”
“In comparison, the wealth of the rest of the top 1%—roughly 1.2 million households each worth at least $11.2 million—grew by an average of $450,000 per household, per year,” the Journal added.
Meanwhile, families at the bottom of the U.S. income and wealth distribution have struggled due to what the Economic Policy Instituterecently described as “policy-induced wage suppression.”
A February working paper by the think tank RAND estimated that the bottom 90% of U.S. workers would have earned $3.9 trillion more in 2023 alone had the income distribution been more even rather than flowing disproportionately to the top.
“Since 1975, nearly $80 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%,” Sanders said last month in response to the paper. “The massive income and wealth inequality in America today is not only morally unjust, it is profoundly damaging to our democracy.”
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Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk attend the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on January 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson – Pool/Getty Images)
Major media outlets from CBS to The Washington Post have “bent the knee” to President Trump’s specious demands.
U.S. President Donald Trump is following the authoritarian’s handbook that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán used to consolidate power in Hungary. He is attacking the independent institutions that comprise the infrastructure supporting democracy—universities, law firms, culture, and the media.
And he is winning.
Major media outlets have “bent the knee” his press secretary’s preferred phrase for capitulation to Trump’s specious demands. His latest conquest is CBS.
CBS
Days before the 2024 election, Trump filed a frivolous lawsuit accusing the network of bias in broadcasting a “60 Minutes” interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Seeking $10 billion in damages, the complaint claimed that the edited interview and associated programming were “partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference” intended to “mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales” in Harris’ favor.
Prominent First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams said that “the First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation.” Harvard Law School Professor Rebecca Tushnet called it “ridiculous junk and should be mocked.” Attorney Charles Tobin warned, “This is a frivolous and dangerous attempt by a politician to control the news media.”
A few days later, Trump won the election. And now CBS’ parent company, Paramount, wants to settle the case.
Whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion.
Through her family’s holding company, Shari Redstone who is “friendly with Trump” is Paramount’s controlling shareholder. If the Federal Communications Commission approves its pending merger with Skydance Media, Redstone will reap millions.
On February 6, Redstone told the Paramount board that she wanted to settle Trump’s lawsuit. The next day, Trump doubled his damages claim to $20 billion. As the media reported Redstone’s desire to resolve the case, Trump pounced. On April 13, he asserted on social media that the FCC should impose “the maximum fine and punishment” on CBS and the network “should lose its license.”
The parties have agreed on a mediator, but whatever money CBS pays Trump to settle his frivolous lawsuit is extortion. The more profound cost is the loss of CBS’ journalistic independence, which became apparent on April 22 when the producer of “60 Minutes” resigned.
In the program’s 57-year history, Bill Owens—who became the “60 Minutes” executive producer in 2019 after 30 years at CBS—was only the third person to run it. Owens’s memo to his staff should be a warning to all of us:
“[O]ver the past months, it has become clear that I would not be allowed to run the show as I have always run it, to make independent decisions based on what was right for ‘60 Minutes,’ right for the audience.”
CBS wasn’t Trump’s first media victim.
The Washington Post
In early November 2024, The Washington Post editorial board had signed off on an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. But it never ran. Owner Jeff Bezos personally killed it and, for the first time in decades, the paper did not endorse a U.S. presidential candidate.
A few hours after Bezos’s “no endorsement” decision became public, officials from his Blue Origin aerospace company, which has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA, met with Trump.
After Trump won the election, Bezos flew to Mar-a-Lago where he and his fiancée dined with the president-elect. Shortly thereafter, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. And another Bezos company—Amazon—paid $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, who personally will receive $28 million.
On February 26, Bezos announced a new rightward shift for the Post: It would now advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.
The paper’s opinion section editor, David Shipley, resigned in response to the change. Prominent columnists followed him out the door, and more than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions.
The Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times had an established record of presidential endorsements too—until 2024. Its 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden blasted Trump. But in 2024, billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong quashed an editorial that would have endorsed Vice President Harris. As at the Post, columnists and editorial board members resigned in protest, and the paper lost thousands of subscribers.
After the election, Soon-Shiong killed another editorial set to run with this headline: “Donald Trump’s cabinet choices are not normal. The Senate’s confirmation process should be.”
Self-censorship is the most effective, enduring, and dangerous method of abridging free speech.
Facebook
More than one-half of Americans “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media. One-third of all adults in the U.S. get their news from Facebook (operated by Meta). Meta’s president Mark Zuckerberg was among the billionaires who traveled to Mar-a-Lago after the election, met with Trump, and donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. (With the help of corporate and billionaire megadonors like Zuckerberg and Bezos, Trump raised a record $239 million for the fund.)
Then Zuckerberg gave Trump a bigger gift: Meta abandoned third-party fact-checking of Facebook posts. As his rationale, Zuckerberg repeated Trump’s false talking points that fact-checking was “censorship” and reflected an “anti-Trump bias.”
Asked if he thought Zuckerberg was “directly responding to the threats” that Trump had made to him in the past, Trump answered: “Probably.”
Meanwhile, Meta invited Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump supporter, to join its board of directors.
PBS and NPR
On April 26, Trump will send Congress his request to halt all funding for public media—including NPR and PBS.
Viktor Orbán’s Playbook—The Trump Sequel
Since his return to power, Hungary’s prime minister has used “muscular state policy to achieve conservative ends,” according to conservative activist Christopher Rufo. Orbán is “attempting to rebuild its culture and institutions, from schools to universities to media.”
Orbán began “working with friendly oligarchs to purchase and transform media companies into conservative stalwarts; directing government advertising budgets to politically-aligned outlets;… and pressuring the holdover state media… to provide more favorable coverage.”
Rufo insists that Hungary “has a media environment at least as competitive as that of many Western nations.” Experienced observers disagree:
Human Rights Watch found that the government is using its near media monopoly to strengthen its hold on democratic institutions… The government’s increased control over the media market is linked to its broader assault on rule of law in Hungary, including undermining judicial independence and state capture of public institutions…
Trump’s attacks on universities, law firms, culture, and the media are all of a piece. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary provides a roadmap of his battle plan and a preview of his end game.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
U.S. ambassador to the UK Warren Stephens. Credit: Arkansas Inc / YouTube
Warren Stephens made the donation alongside big tech firms and oil giants.
Donald Trump’s ambassador to the UK donated $4 million to the new U.S. president’s inauguration on the same day he was nominated for the diplomatic position, DeSmog can report.
Billionaire Warren Stephens gave $4 million (just under £3 million today) to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee on 2 December, according to the official record of donations. The committee is appointed by the president-elect to arrange the inauguration ceremony, when a U.S. president is formally sworn into office.
“It’s not so surprising that a transactional president hands out favours to people who give him money, but that doesn’t make it any less outrageous,” said Agustina Oliveri, head of campaigns and communications at the Good Law Project.
There is no direct evidence that Warren secured the position due to this donation. However, U.S. presidents have a long history of handing out diplomatic roles to major donors, while the Trump administration has bestowed his patrons with a number of senior positions. Of the 37 people who gave $1 million or more to the inauguration committee, six have either been given a role in the administration or have been nominated for a role.
Tom Brake, a former Liberal Democrat MP and the director of the transparency campaign group Unlock Democracy, urged the UK government not to follow Trump’s lead.
“Whatever approach the U.S. administration adopts towards the appointment of its ambassadors, the UK government should make it clear that when it comes to appointing UK ambassadors or high commissioners, donating substantial sums of money directly or indirectly to the party of government will block an appointment not facilitate it,” he said. “There must never be a question mark over whether UK appointments are made on merit, or driven by a donor’s deep pockets.”
As DeSmog revealed on 5 December, Warren Stephens holds significant oil and gas interests. Prior to his appointment as Trump’s UK ambassador, he ran Stephens Inc. – one of the largest privately-owned investment banks in the United States. Stephens has since stood down as CEO, but remains its chairman.
The firm’s portfolio includes a number of companies that make their money from oil and gas exploration and production — including one, Stephens Natural Resources, which “has a rich history of drilling and producing both oil and natural gas”, according to its website.
The UK’s ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson also co-founded a public affairs agency with major fossil fuel clients.
Trump’s inauguration committee – which raised almost $240 million – received donations from fossil fuel giants Chevron ($2 million), ExxonMobil ($1 million), the U.S. branches of BP and Shell ($500,000 each), and Valero ($250,000).
It also accepted donations from major tech platforms including Amazon and Meta, whose founders Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg received a front row seat to the event.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Credit: WSJ / YouTube
The inauguration committee received a further $1 million from the Heritage Foundation, a hard-right U.S. research and lobby group which drafted the “autocratic” Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term.
Trump denied knowledge of Project 2025 during the election campaign but has subsequently appointed Russell Vought, one of its advisory board members and co-authors, as director of the Office for Management and Budget (OMB), a key department within the president’s office that helps to oversee and co-ordinate policy.
Project 2025 urged Trump to “dismantle the administrative state”, slash restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, scrap state investment in renewable energy, and gut the Environmental Protection Agency.
Since his inauguration on 20 January, Trump has announced a series of policies that have mirrored these demands.
The new president, who received more than $75 million from oil and gas interests for his re-election campaign, has pledged to once again withdraw the U.S. from the flagship 2015 Paris Agreement, which set an international target for limiting global warming. He has also declared a “national energy emergency” to allow the U.S. to “drill, baby, drill” for new fossil fuels.
“When we look at the dumpster fire of U.S. government policy – from trashing the planet to attacking basic human rights – there’s no point in asking ‘What are they up to?’. The question we need to focus on is ‘Who paid for that?,’” said Oliveri.
The U.S. embassy in London referred DeSmog’s enquiry to the U.S. State Department. The Heritage Foundation was approached for comment.
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