Jeff Bezos isn't going to die of heat, but you will.

Perhaps the most obscene thing about Jeff Bezos's wedding on June 27th wasn't the millions he spent (what's $40 million to the fourth richest person in the world?), nor the tacky outfits worn by his guests, nor even the fact that he rented an island to celebrate. But rather that the island was in the heart of Venice. Ah, Venice, the city of love and canals... One of the world's biggest polluters, in one of the cities most threatened by the climate crisis . It sounds like a joke or an episode of The Simpsons , but here came Bezos with his 90 private jets and his €500 million yacht to tell the rest of us mortals that when you're powerful, you can do whatever you want.

I imagine he wanted photos of things that will no longer exist in a few years. Venice is expected to sink in about 75 years, but if we continue at this rate—and, especially, if Bezos and his colleagues continue at this rate—he'll soon be able to show them to his grandchildren and say, "All this used to be a city."

I tend to pay close attention to the tech oligarchs' every move because they're the ones with the most information on everything. And what seems like eccentricities may not be so. For example, the wedding gift for Lauren Sánchez, that Blue Origin spaceflight—was it a live-your-own-story gift, affection, publicity for their company, or the first steps of an escapist fantasy?

As Douglas Rushkoff tells us in the essay "Survival of the Richest: Escapist Fantasies of Technological Billionaires" (Capitán Swing, 2023), billionaires already know that we are heading for collapse and have begun to prepare . Bunkers on private islands, dreams of colonizing Mars, or permanent housing complexes at sea. Nothing grows exponentially in the world, says Rushkoff, nothing more than cancer. And it eventually kills the host. That is what billionaires are now understanding: that the exponential growth of the technology they have created will eventually kill what we know. And the escape they are preparing for is from the damage they are causing.

We have just left behind the hottest June on record. If you are one of those who think that summer has always been hot and that this is not a big deal, you are right, but only about the first point . Miguel Ángel Criado tells it in his essay Heat. How the Climate Crisis Affects Us (Debate, 2024). What it has not been is this hot in winter, nor have there been such long summers, nor have the water temperatures been so high, nor have there been such dangerous Danas, no matter how much you have read to the contrary in X, owned by another billionaire who, by the way, already has his bunker built.