Why Jeff Bezos's girlfriend Lauren Sanchez could be the world's most powerful woman

Anyone who chanced upon Jeff Bezos’s selfies aboard a luxury yacht in St Barts earlier this month would have been forgiven for doing a double take. 

In mirrored heart-shaped shades and a gaudy £500 silk shirt so tight it might have been tattooed on to the 57-year-old’s torso, the Amazon boss looked more like US rapper Pitbull than the one-time monobrowed tech nerd who achieved global domination in a pair of high-waisted beige chinos.

But it was the stunning brunette wrapped around him on the 88-foot vessel, Tender To – which cost a meagre £31,000 a week to charter – who completed the new look. In a backless, cutaway metallic 1970s jumpsuit that left little to the imagination, Lauren Sanchez discoed her way into 2022. 

As well she might. After all, if Forbes were to publish a ‘Most Powerful Girlfriends’ issue, this 52-year-old media personality would be at the top of the list.

Beneath Bezos’s New Year selfie – the caption celebrating ‘personal growth, renewal, rebirth’ – his girlfriend of three years (according to official timelines at least) commented: ‘I love you baby. For every reason and no reason.’

Although when Bezos (now 58) and Sanchez first came out as a couple at Wimbledon in July 2019, cynics speculated that there might be 114 billion reasons why the striking journalist might have fallen for the tech mogul and owner of space tourism outfit Blue Origin – and a spate of predictable headlines ensued.

Disregarding the fact that Sanchez was a mother of three who had been in a 14-year marriage (to Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell) until she met Bezos, the tabloids chose to focus instead on the scarlet woman ‘with an uncanny ability to make people do anything’; the tireless temptress with a seduction routine once infamous enough in Hollywood to be dubbed ‘The Sanchez Method’.

It had only been six months since Bezos and ex-wife MacKenzie Scott had announced the end of their marriage in a heartfelt tweet assuring people, ‘If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again.’ 

But according to the National Inquirer, who had acquired explicit texts and photographs exchanged between Bezos and Sanchez, his affair with the TV journalist had started back in 2018.

Today, all this is water under the bridge for the key characters in this midlife love story. 

MacKenzie Scott – now the third richest woman in the US – has since married their children’s science teacher, Dan Jewett; Whitesell married Australian actor Pia Miller last year; and anyone zooming in on paparazzi pictures of Sanchez on that yacht will have noticed that her left hand was weighed down by a huge yellow heart-shaped ring, fuelling rumours that 2022 is the year Bezos and Sanchez will make their union official.

In all but age (Bezos’s first wife is a year younger), at first glance Sanchez fits the ‘other woman’ trope. At Charles Finch and Chanel’s star-studded pre-Oscars dinner in February 2020, she and Bezos were seated at a neighbouring table to mine – and unable to keep their hands off one another. 

I remember thinking that this beautiful, lithe, vivacious woman with a love of bodycon-wear must be the stuff of nightmares for insecure billionaire’s wives around the globe. But that’s where Sanchez stops conforming ‘to type’ – if indeed there is one.

Born to second-generation Mexican American parents – Eleanor and Ray Sanchez – in Albuquerque, Sanchez has been a familiar TV face in the US for decades. 

After completing a journalism scholarship at USC, she started her career as a desk assistant at the LA digital channel KCOP-TV and rose quickly through the ranks to become an anchor and reporter for KTVK-TV in Phoenix and entertainment channel Extra. 

One journalist who worked alongside Sanchez there remembers her as being ‘bubbly, fun, feisty and outgoing. When she interviewed celebrities on the junket circuit everyone got along really well with her – even if none of us ever suspected she might end up the second Mrs Bezos.’

After moving to Fox Sports Net where she could indulge her love of competitive sport, a former friend of Sanchez’s remembers a brief engagement to fellow sports broadcaster Rory Markas. 

She returned to KCOP-TV as an anchor in 1999, where she won an Emmy, and became the first Hispanic female ever to hold the 11pm anchor position. 

‘When I first became a reporter,’ she later said in a 2018 interview with British entertainment reporter Mark Wright, ‘I did it because there was no one else [out there] that looked like me.’

Actor Alice Evans, who met Sanchez ‘on the circuit’ in the mid-2000s when she had just been made the original host of Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance, says she was extremely well liked within the industry. 

‘She always remembered everybody’s names, treated people with respect and made you feel important. But it never felt grating or false, as it so often can in Hollywood. She really stood out in that way. And don’t forget that she had recently married Patrick [Whitesell] – who wasn’t just an agent, but THE agent.’

As the co-CEO of Hollywood talent agency William Morris Endeavor, Whitesell still looks after the likes of Ben Affleck, Christian Bale, Matt Damon, Michelle Williams, Hugh Jackman and Denzel Washington. 

‘But back in the day his parties were legendary,’ says Evans, ‘and more difficult to get into than Vanity Fair etc. So after that Lauren had years and years of being at the epicentre of everything. She knew everyone.’

Sanchez already had a son from a previous relationship with NFL player Tony Gonzalez – Nikko, now 20 – when she married Whitesell in 2005, and the two have remained so close over the years that Gonzalez even joined his ex and Bezos aboard Tender To for their New Year cruise. 

Then, in 2006, she and Whitesell had another boy, Evan, followed by a daughter, Eleanor, in 2008. And after taking a couple of years off Sanchez returned to work in 2011 to co-host Fox’s morning TV show Good Day LA, where she remained until 2017.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that year, Sanchez admitted that while she ‘loved entertainment and filming’, it wasn’t until she became a licensed helicopter pilot in 2016 that she found her true ‘calling’. 

She had developed an interest in aviation thanks to her flight instructor father, ‘and was always in the hangar growing up’.

Studying for the exam had proved a challenge for Sanchez, however, who was only diagnosed with dyslexia as an adult, and in that same interview confessed that as a child ‘I just thought I was stupid […] I felt like I had to hide it because it just wasn’t something that people talked about.’

But according to Mark Wright, who remembers their jaunt vividly, she was a natural up there in the sky. ‘We spent a couple of hours together and she took me for a ride in her chopper to show me how it all worked,’ he says of the woman who now runs aerial production company Black Ops Aviation, and has her own hangar at Santa Monica Airport, which houses her Cirrus plane and her Astar 350B helicopter, Whiskey Whiskey. 

‘She was a complete pro, knowledgeable and clearly highly intelligent – but also fun. I have nothing but praise for Lauren Sanchez.’

Fate seemed to be leading her directly to Bezos, who was preparing to launch Blue Origin at the time. And when Whitesell allegedly introduced the two of them later that year at an event for the film Manchester by the Sea – according to the author of Amazon Unbound, journalist Brad Stone – Bezos decided to hire Sanchez to work on the project.

Beyond the obvious (on both sides) it’s now easy to see how many deeper commonalities drew these two together, and why their relationship defied the ‘I give it a year’ predictions from doom-mongers.

Ever since that giant bauble appeared on Sanchez’s finger, however, the questions have moved on, from ‘will they, or won’t they?’ to what kind of influence Mrs Bezos II might have on her husband – beyond that 360-degree transformation from dweeb-suited executive to buff and swarthy playboy.

According to a UK hedge-funder who works with Silicon Valley heads, Sanchez will be encouraging Bezos to ‘give back’ more over the next few years and be keen to ‘reposition them as Bill and Melinda Gates-style philanthropists’. 

‘Sanchez will be more aware of the public perception, which isn’t great right now, what with the bad publicity Amazon has been getting about worker conditions and the company’s increasing greenhouse gas emissions,’ he says. ‘She will also care more about turning around that perception.’

It was after meeting Sanchez that Bezos set up the Bezos Earth Fund where she is listed as vice chair. 

Since then he has committed to hand out over $10 billion to help fight climate change and protect nature through a variety of global programmes set out by the initiative, which has also started to focus more on how pollution and environmental degradation disproportionately harm low-income neighbourhoods and other vulnerable groups. 

‘So moving forward, that aspect looks likely to become a bigger part of the Bezos Earth Fund’s messaging.’

‘In their minds, at least, this might help offset the criticism prompted both by his space transportation business – one both of them are captivated by – and Sanchez’s love of aviation. Because these are definitely seen as conflicts of interest when it comes to their environmental concerns.’

Bezos’s relatively recent interest in the ‘immortality industry’ also looks likely to be a bigger project moving forward, says another Silicon Valley source. 

‘So I’d expect to see a lot more investments in start-ups like Altos Labs, which he already has a stake in, and is pursuing biological reprogramming technology that might ultimately prolong human life.’

Bezos certainly has a vested personal interest in that now; even if, from what one can tell, Sanchez seems to have encouraged the one-time workaholic to be more spontaneous and eke as much joy out of daily life as he can. 

It’s perhaps no coincidence that last year Whitesell opted to sell the Beverly Hills home in which he and Sanchez raised their children. 

Just a few months prior to the $22 million sale, Bezos had quietly purchased David Geffen’s Warner Estate, across the road, for a cool $165 million. There goes the neighbourhood.

But in Beverly Hills, as in LA as a whole, second chapters aren’t just accepted but encouraged – even celebrated. And Lisa Gaché, author of Beverly Hills Manners, laughs off the idea of there being any kind of residual stigma around these two.

‘Here in la-la land, we are used to famous people coupling and then just as famously uncoupling,’ she tells me. ‘It’s considered a Hollywood record if a relationship lasts beyond four months, let alone three years! So far, this duo seems to be a perfect fit. And it’s easy to see why they’ve gone for the Warner property. It has all the privacy and grandeur of a faraway estate but is just a stone’s throw from the hustle and bustle of downtown Beverly Hills.’

As love nests go, the place is certainly unique. The 1920s Georgian Revival-style nine-acre property has multiple guest houses, a tennis court, a nine-hole golf course and wood flooring that, according to the Los Angeles Times, was imported from overseas and is the very same floor Napoleon stood on when he proposed to Empress Joséphine. Not that one can imagine Sanchez and Bezos looking anywhere other than skyward.