All's Fair for Billionaires

So Bezos bought his second wife the Met Gala.

This post was initially about Kris Jenner’s birthday party. It was her 70th, and it was at Jeff and Lauren’s house. Well, one of their houses, I presume. A $165 million one in LA.

I posted a couple hot takes on my Instagram story when the photos came out on November 10th and my girls all responded enthusiastically, so I wrote a draft of this post, but I was just sitting on it. Even a simple culture post on a billionaire birthday party feels dangerous these days. Stakes are so high.

(Isn’t it funny how the more wealth they extract from us, the closer we feel to them? Like the more they consolidate industries and power, the closer their breath gets to our neck, until they feel us breathing, too? Side note, how many people laid off this year so far?)

Anyway. I was sitting on the draft, thinking it would basically be an entry in my diary, Dear Diary, Kris turned 70 and all the billionaires came to fête her. And then a week later Jeff and Lauren bought the Met Ball.

Sure, they're sponsoring it. And listen, this is better than earlier this year when we heard that Jeff was buying all of Condé Nast, and Lauren was going to replace Anna Wintour. Maybe this is just the first step there. But something is collapsing here, condensing, tightening, and I think it's Power. The boundaries between old domains are falling away, from Hollywood to D.C. to Mumbai, and the players at the top are so integrated in their dealings that they can all be found at a single little birthday party in the Hollywood Hills.

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Maybe 18 months ago I started sending my sister Instagram posts of Jeff's wife, then fiancée, Lauren Sanchez on the Kardashians’ feeds. I’ve been tracking this, let’s call it, cultural formation, for a minute. She was at a birthday party, they're at her ladies’ lunch, the pics always posted with the most anodyne sorority girl captions, like, “Sweetest girls ever!”

It was clear to me immediately that Lauren was a deployment into a cultural power center. What was not clear, maybe not even to them at the time, was that this cultural center was acquiring the superlative gravity of a black hole.

Before we go futher, let’s be very clear: I am a huge fan of the Kardashians, and the Jenners too. You will not get me to say I hate them. They are geniuses. If there is anyone on this earth that you extol as a business genius, there is no case except for misogyny for excluding the Kardashians. They are business. Geniuses.

Only if all your heroes are real heroes can you discount them. And even then you cannot discount their power.

That said, I also am a cultural critic. And I still think about how progressive darling Ilana Glazer did her climate apocalypse stand-up special on Amazon. In other words, I have watched Amazon use Prime Video for several years to buy their way into cultural relevance. They have sponsored some of the most edgy, relevant artists out there to push their way past a stale, static e-commerce website into the centers of our moving picture screens: our tv habits, our celebrity scrolls.

And now, Oh how they’ve succeeded.

(I also watched Apple try to buy its way into cultural relevance, with Beats. But they didn’t know what to do with it. With Dr. Dre. With urban cool. Because they didn’t care about it. They still sent U2 to our iPods.

But Amazon knows what to do with it, because Jeff knows what to do with it, because Jeff wants something from them. He wants to be with them. He wants to be cool.

Steve Jobs actually was cool, so his company didn’t need to buy cool, didn’t know how to buy cool, even if it wanted to buy a new kind of cool.

Lauren was the bridge. She made it natural. Not a deal, but an alliance. Not a strategy, but a singularity. )

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That was the newer part of my post. Here's where I actually started:

So Kris Jenner’s birthday, at Jeff Bezos’s house. Who was there? Only Oprah, Tyler Perry, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, Harry and Megan of Sussex, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Bill Gates. You know, all the friends of **** *******’s. Imagine who would’ve been invited six months ago. Or a year and a week?? I feel sure Ivanka and Jared were there, studiously unphotographed and unposted—remember, Kim soft-launched Ivanka back into the White House at her 43th birthday dinner, last year. Hell, Elon might have been in a corner somewhere, ranting.

Everyone was there. You don’t say no to Kris. She never says no, not once in her goddamned life, and now you can’t, either.

But also, you’d be stupid not to go, if you were invited. Here are two of my favorite characters: Stephanie Suganami, Kim’s former assistant, and her husband of 2 years, a guy named Larry Jackson. Larry joined Apple with Beats, tried like hell to make Apple a music brand, then left and formed his own label, Gamma, signed Usher and Snoop, and his first year in operation, got Usher his Super Bowl slot, in collaboration with Jay-Z.

There are more people like this. It’s not in my interest to tell you everyone I’ve noticed. Do your own research. But there were more billionaires in that building than at just about any event, of any kind, that you can name. Davos, UN, the Ambani wedding, which Kim and Khloe went to. That’s only one billionaire. Kris just including the rest of her daughters has two. And Kendall is the world’s literal highest paid model. If only she could serve anything, imagine what she’d earn!

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Let’s switch gears. I wrote act iii of this post by watching 2 episodes of Kim's new show.

All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s new high-camp 1-hour drama featuring Kim K at the top of the lead line, along with Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash, Naomi Watts, and Glenn Close, as divorce attorneys, just premiered. The reviews are so bad that Kim had to post them and pretend she thought they were funny. It’s still the most watched Disney show in the world right now.

The plot is pretty good, but the writing is abhorrent. There is nothing that could be described as characterization, not even in the most cliché way— the nerdy one, the needy one, the flirty one. The characters are much wealthier than any real lawyers and get treated like the talent, which lawyers in reality do not— unless they are Tom Girardi, which we all now should understand as the exception that makes the rule.

The most creative element of the All’s Fair script is how misogynistic it is. Top actors calling each other cunts and cum dumpsters is not my idea of a good time, especially when the rest of the script gives nothing to earn this shock. Another complaint: Kim’s husband in the show is not nearly hot enough, especially given who else in the series he is fucking. He should be giving McDreamy or Morris Chestnut, and instead I’m getting SHEIN Smith Jerrod.

Digression: I have this theory of casting that there are so many desperate, talented people, that everyone cast in a secondary role in any production with any real budget looks exactly as the producers desired. For example, Taylor Swift’s backup dancers (no further comment). Or this Smith Jerrod wannabe. They specifically chose someone far beneath Kim in hotness and with whom she has zero on-screen chemistry so that she wouldn’t have romantic rumors with him. It is in fact a fact that every man on All's Fair is mid. Kim’s woodenness is like a toxic gas that afflicts everyone around her, bringing them to her level. In brief moments, like when Naomi Watts and Judith Light are on the floor together, going through jewelry, alone, there are moments of Acting, but even Acting can’t resuscitate a dead script.

As I was live narrating this critique this my roommate kept interjecting to defend Kim and I said I LOVE Kim! No one loves Kim more than me! (And don't even get me started on Kylie!) But I love her for all of who she is, and who she is is a bad actor with deep issues with insecurity and compulsive overwork that drove her and her mom to buy her this show and put her in the lead.

If you haven’t boycotted Hulu, a better watch than s1e1 of All’s Fair is s6e4 of The Kardashians, in which Glenn Close and the whole cast of All’s Fair come to Kris’s house to watch Fatal Attraction. Sarah Paulson’s unhinged glee is worth it alone. Also shoutout Niecy Nash for bringing her wife with her. I just imagine her at their modest multimillion dollar home turning to her wife and being like babe, want to do something crazy? I’m going to Kris’s house to drink martinis, would you want to come? And Jessica was like, let me grab my jammies.

The cringiest part of the Kardashians episode was Kris thanking her guests for welcoming Kim into the set and praising Kim’s performance and all these A-list actors having to be like yes, yes it was no problem at all, Kim was absolutely a pleasure to work with. It’s like if your boss thanked you, crying, for taking on his daughter as senior manager--as your boss. Because Kris produced All’s Fair. I’m sure Kim was very professional. She just didn’t, you know, emote.

If any of the Kardashian-Jenners are reading this, I want you to know that I love you and truly look forward to telling you that in person one day. Kris, you have positioned yourself at the absolute center of world power right now. I just hope it’s good company.