Lauren Sánchez on Going to Space, Giving Back, and Her High-Flying Romance With Jeff Bezos (2024)

It’s a little early, ladies,” says Jeff Bezos, and he erupts with his signature machine-gun laugh. His fiancée, the newscaster turned helicopter pilot turned philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, has just asked Bezos to make us margaritas. It is 2 p.m. “We’ve had a long day!” she says, with a coy smile. Indeed, Sánchez has already taken me on a helicopter tour of the vast West Texas ranch where Bezos spends holidays and launches rockets from his Blue Origin space facility. We have also descended 500 feet to the base of the so-called 10,000 Year Clock, a subterranean engineering feat envisioned by Bezos with next generations in mind. “It represents thinking about the future,” Sánchez says.

Sánchez, 53, and Bezos, 59, have their eyes trained on their own future. In May, Bezos proposed to Sánchez with a pink diamond, possibly viewable from space and definitely viewable through a paparazzo’s long lens aimed at the prow of Koru, Bezos’s three-masted sailing yacht, the largest in the world, which kicked off her maiden voyage with a newly engaged couple unabashed in their deckside canoodling. Portmanteau pending (BezChez?), the couple were seemingly everywhere this summer. You couldn’t open a tabloid without a new snap (courtesy of paparazzi or Sánchez’s Instagram) of them blissfully bobbing around Europe: Bezos emerging from the water like a Mediterranean He-Man in palm-print swim trunks, his fiancée captioning the photo “Is it just me, or is it hot outside?”; the couple flanked by security and a group of Koru guests, including Usher and Katy Perry, strolling the old city streets of Dubrovnik; the at-sea engagement party where Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and Queen Rania of Jordan all fêted Bezos and Sánchez, the latter presiding in a glittering silver miniskirt and crop top.

Today, Sánchez is also wearing a crop top: a ribbed white T-shirt with a black Fendi logo obscured by a jumble of jewels—diamonds and good-luck charms—around her neck. Our first meeting was midmorning on this 102-degree day, when she popped out of a Blue Origin Rivian truck at Astronaut Village, the cluster of Airstream trailers where the photographer Annie Leibovitz, fashion editor Tabitha Simmons, and crew had been put up after yesterday’s sweeping photo shoot across the vast Texas property. Security was tight but unobtrusive. The vibe was Oppenheimer meets Amangiri.

At Astronaut Village, Sánchez hugged everyone in her path, including me. “Chloe! I feel like I know you!” she said, continuing to hold my arms. She was cleanly made-up, practically photo-shoot-ready all over again, in Staud + Wrangler jeans and Alexander McQueen sneakers, pristine white despite the dust. “We’re flying, otherwise I’d be in cowboy boots,” she said, before adding conspiratorially, “though I have flown in heels before.”

With that, she led me toward a Bell 429 helicopter: “There’s my baby, and it’s not Jeff!” Over a decade ago, Sánchez earned her fixed-wing pilot’s license and then trained to become certified as a helicopter pilot. Following a successful run as a TV newscaster, she formed an aerial production company that has consulted on films such as Dunkirk and now shoots all of Blue Origin’s launches. She’s also inspired Bezos to get his pilot’s license, and she talks about helicopters the way teenage equestriennes talk about their horses: “Isn’t she gorgeous?”

Indeed, Sánchez is not shy about her physique. The prow of Koru—Maori for “new beginnings”—is adorned with a voluptuous figurehead, one that has been gleefully suggested in the press to be carved in Sánchez’s image. “I’m very flattered, but it’s not,” said Sánchez. In fact, the figurehead is one of Bezos’s favorite mythological figures, Freyja, Norse goddess of love, fertility, war, and gold. “If it was me…” Sánchez joked, and made a gesture of having larger breasts.

Much has been made of Bezos’s evolution from round-shouldered online bookseller to Tony Stark titan of industry and the third richest man in the world. Once insular and press-shy, he formed a tight cocoon around Amazon, his then wife, MacKenzie, and their four children in Seattle. Now it’s as if he’s emerged from his chrysalis, a swole monarch, no longer Amazon CEO (a role he ceded in 2021) but an empty nester who is venturing not only into the Adriatic but into outer space. Sánchez, by all accounts, is the perfect partner for all of it—unbridled in her enthusiasm (seven people I spoke to described her as a “force”) but also socially adept, attentive, a diplomat of a kind. “Lauren has amazing intuition, almost witchy powers in that regard,” says Bezos. “She sees things that other people don’t see. She’s really very sensitive to other people and what they’re thinking.”

“She’s a sparkler in Jeff’s life,” says Barry Diller, who with his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, are two of Bezos’s closest friends and will host a second engagement party for the couple at their home in Beverly Hills. “They’re very in love with each other—they’re demonstrably in love,” he adds. “She’s lit him up in the nicest ways. She’s a great stimulant.”

“Since she’s been with Jeff, she is more peaceful and more calm. She appears more herself,” says her sister, Elena Sánchez Blair, sounding a note I heard often: that Sánchez is delighted by her new life but resolutely the person she’s always been—trained on her family and those she loves. “You see her, this beautiful force all done up in ball gowns, but the truth is most of the time we are on the couch in sweats and yoga pants, playing Sloppy Dice or Heads Up on our phones,” Sánchez Blair tells me.

Bezos seems the one who has changed—and that’s by his own account. “She has really helped me put more energy into my relationships,” he says. “She’s always encouraging me: ‘Call your kids. Call your dad. Call your mom.’ And she’s also just a very good role model. She keeps in touch with people. I’ve never seen her put makeup on without calling somebody. Usually her sister.”

I hear this laugh often, in fact. Bezos guffaws when I ask if he will get involved with wedding planning: “Oh, God, no. Do I look that dumb?”

“We’re still thinking about the wedding,” says Sánchez, “what it’s going to be. Is it going to be big? Is it going to be overseas? We don’t know yet. We’ve only been engaged five months!” He proposed at the start of their summer at sea, hiding the ring under her pillow after a starlit dinner à deux. She found it at bedtime, her makeup off. “When he opened the box, I think I blacked out a bit,” she tells me.

Will she be taking his name? She looks at me like I am insane. “Uh, yes, one hundred percent. I am looking forward to being Mrs. Bezos.”

As to the responsibilities that come with being married to one of the richest men in the world? She pauses, careful: “I think there are a lot of opportunities that come with that, and I take those opportunities very seriously. We always look at each other and go, ‘We’re the team.’ So everything’s shared.”

And the dress? “There’s so many incredible designers!” She names Christian Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, and Valentino as favorites. “Once I get a minute, I’ll slow down.” Up first, though, is Bezos’s 60th birthday party in January. “It’s a huge birthday,” she says. “There is no slowing him down. He works all the time.”

Bezos has begun scooping ice for our margaritas—“This is my backup career,” he says of his dexterity behind the bar—though he won’t be having one himself. “I have a couple more meetings.” (The day before, the FTC sued Amazon for allegedly violating antitrust laws.) The co*cktail shakers are rocket-ship-shaped; Sánchez found them on eBay. Our glasses are modeled after the Blue Origin rocket capsule, complete with porthole-shaped etchings. Bezos is meticulous—slow, frankly—in his bartending, exactly measuring the amount of Milagro tequila and triple sec and slicing the limes into perfect crescents. He wears a black T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, and tiger’s-eye and silver-chain bracelets. “I don’t think we have salt. I was going to give you a salted rim,” he says. “It’s a very important part of the margarita.” Within minutes an eight-ounce deli container of salt is magically supplied by one of the Astronaut Village team members. “Wow, there’s like a salt genie out there!” marvels Bezos.

In January 2019, Sánchez and Bezos themselves made front-page news when their love affair was made public in a National Enquirer imbroglio, prompting Bezos to post a call to arms decrying the tabloid. Since then, both Bezos and Sánchez finalized their divorces and have looked only forward, and upward, to space.

Sánchez tells me she was present for Blue Origin’s first crewed flight to space in 2021, with Bezos aboard. “They were cracking jokes in the capsule,” says Sánchez, with mock incredulity. “While I’m literally crying, holding his mother.” Bezos notes the power of seeing his entire family come out to wish him, and his brother who joined the launch, goodbye at 4:30 a.m. “It’s profound,” he says. “You get to see how loved you are by so many people.”

Sánchez had silver feather necklaces made for the whole crew, with “Gradatim Ferociter”—step by step, ferociously, Blue Origin’s Latin motto—engraved on the back. There were custom baseball caps with a white feather on the front and, over the ponytail hole, the phrase “Love you to space and back,” a favorite saying between Sánchez and Bezos, embroidered in her lilting cursive.

Sánchez herself plans to venture into space next year, filling the capsule of the New Shepard (the name of Blue Origin’s reusable 60-foot suborbital rocket) with five other women, about whom she will say only that they will be remarkable, and are “paving the way for women.” She also has a forthcoming children’s book, The Fly Who Flew to Space, about Flynn, an insectile astronaut turned environmentalist. What does she say to people who think the launches are just adrenaline adventures for the wealthy? “Jeff always says, ‘Building the road to space so that our children can build the future.’ And that’s what it’s about. Launch, land, repeat, over and over so that we can figure out how to have reusable rockets.” She references the Wright brothers’ barnstorming flights that allowed paying patrons joy rides in planes so that they could practice their invention.

Sánchez had chaps and Western jackets made for everyone for a horseback camping trip, and evenings were filled with games of Catan and chess. “It’s hard to beat Jeff at chess,” says Nikko, when I speak to him by phone. He is finishing his last semester at Boulder remotely while living with his girlfriend in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and working at social club Zero Bond. “Everyone really just gets along,” he adds. “There’s no real alliances. It’s kind of boring in that way.”

“Our lives are pretty normal,” is how Sánchez puts it. “Daily life mostly revolves around our kids.” Her arrangement with Whitesell means she and Bezos spend alternating weeks with Evan and Ella in LA, where both are in school, and at home, which has been Bezos’s Tudor mansion on Lake Washington, though he announced that they are planning to move to Miami, where he has reportedly bought a waterfront property ("Seattle, you will always have a piece of my heart," he wrote on Instagram.) Bezos’s kids, four in all, are now at college, so there are university visits layered in too. Wherever they are, there’s the same agreement: “Whoever gets up first, that person makes the other person coffee,” she says. Bezos takes his black or with Laird Hamilton’s superfood nondairy creamer, in a self-warming Ember mug. Sánchez uses a mug Bezos got her from Amazon, with the words “Woke up sexy as hell again” splashed across the side.

“We try not to get on our phones right away,” Sánchez says. “That’s what I’m working on.” They’re also trying to journal in the morning, per von Furstenberg’s instruction. “We’re not quite there,” admits Sánchez. “We’ll do it, like, three days a week.”

Sánchez likes to drive her daughter to school. The ritual includes Bezos calling out to Ella before they leave, “Don’t learn anything I wouldn’t learn!”—a line that has become so dependable that the teenager now finishes it for him. “Sometimes we tussle,” Sánchez says of the school runs. “Other times she really opens up, and other times she says nothing and I take it in.” In the evening, after tutoring and piano lessons, the family eats dinner together. “Every night.”

Sánchez and Bezos also work out together: “But we cannot do the same exercises. He’s on a whole different level than I am. He is a monster in the gym.” Bedtime is 9:30 p.m. with a bit of TV (recently Black Bird, about an incarcerated serial killer, as well as Citadel, Jack Ryan, and Black Mirror). Sánchez is also a big audiobook fan—she’s deep into Chop Wood Carry Water: How to Fall in Love with the Process of Becoming Great. And both cook too. On the weekends Bezos makes churros in his deep fryer, a recipe passed down from his Cuban grandfather. “Abuelo made churros whenever we were with him,” says Bezos.

“Okay, but who makes the best breakfast?” asks Sánchez.

“That’s, like, a leading question,” says Bezos with a laugh before dutifully answering that Sánchez does: fried eggs on flour tortillas with New Mexican green chile that Sánchez learned to make from her own grandmother.

Saturday family movie nights are a tradition. The week we meet they’d just enacted their own version of Barbenheimer with Oppenheimer screened Saturday night and Barbie on Sunday. “Of course, Jeff’s favorite movie was Oppenheimer, and I love Barbie. And there you have us summed up in two movies.”

Like Barbie, Sánchez has no chill—as her teenagers might say. This suits her: She giddily points things out, calling everything magical then laughing at herself for doing so. “I say magical a lot, don’t I?” she says with a big smile. “I think one of her greatest qualities is that no matter what situation I can look over and she’s wide-eyed and like, Can you believe where we are right now?” says Tobie Gonzalez. “She’s like a little girl, constant awe and giddiness.”

“I don’t know if you’re supposed to cheer and applaud during a fashion show, but my mom was definitely doing that,” says Nikko, who attended the recent Staud show at the Plaza with her and says it reminded him of his high school football games, where she decked herself out in self-made merch with his number on it and rang a cowbell. “There was not a single year she wasn’t the team mom,” says Nikko.

“I’m extremely enthusiastic,” Sánchez admits with a shrug. Staud designer Sarah Staudinger, wife of Ari Emanuel, Whitesell’s partner at Endeavor, is a friend who was one of the inner circle at her Koru engagement party. For the Fashion Week event, Sánchez wore a Staud black minidress to her show, embroidered with jet bugle beads and a silver constellation pattern (her fiancé’s love of space shared across many mediums).

Does she dress for Jeff? “I always found it interesting that people say, ‘Well, Lauren, you definitely dress more for men.’ I actually dress for myself.”

“But it works for Jeff,” Bezos adds with a wry smile.

At that dinner, put on by the Kering Foundation during New York Fashion Week, Sánchez found herself bidding for Balenciaga couture against her friend Kim Kardashian. “I’m a big auction girl,” says Kardashian, “and my strategy was to come in last minute.” Realizing her rival was Sánchez, Kardashian called across the room—“We’ll share it!”—meaning they could take turns with one dress. “I thought, you wear it once, I’ll wear it once, it’ll be so cute!” says Kardashian. Instead, Kering offered to make two dresses, and both women paid $200,000 and will travel to Paris together for the fitting. “Lauren and I are always sending DMs building each other up,” Kardashian says. “Every time there’s a look that we like, she’ll say, ‘WOW,’ or, ‘OMG you look amazing.’ She’s such a girl’s girl.”

Kardashian was one of the two dozen women at Sánchez’s 53rd birthday luncheon hosted by philanthropist Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen in Malibu (complete with fondant helicopter cake). Bezos also threw Sánchez a surprise birthday dinner at Horses, the West Hollywood hot spot. In his speech, Bezos said, “One thing I learned about Lauren is if I’m in a bind, I can throw the gun to her.”

“I think I can get him out of most situations,” says Sánchez. “I’d fly him out!”

For his birthday, Sánchez gave Bezos a large-format photograph of the science fiction section at the tiny Cotulla, Texas, library. This is where Bezos spent his childhood summers reading Asimov and Heinlein—an experience that inspired his lifelong fascination with space. “She’s a good gift giver,” he says. “She puts a lot of thought into it.”

Her giving has taken on new dimensions since she met Bezos. She’s particularly focused on the environmental work of the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion commitment to climate solutions; the Bezos Academy, a network of tuition-free preschools; and the Courage & Civility Award, which donates $100 million to an individual to disburse at their discretion. “Lauren wakes up thinking about how to help people,” says Elsa Collins, cofounder of This Is About Humanity, an organization supporting separated and reunified families at the US-Mexico border, which recently received $1 million from Sánchez. Collins counts Sánchez as a close friend (they have a pickleball crew) and describes how in “deep COVID” Sánchez called her at 6:20 a.m. wanting to help.

In August, Sánchez drove to Tijuana with her three kids to chop zucchini in the relief kitchen and hand out backpacks filled with toys and necessities labeled by age and gender. One five-year-old girl took out a toy purse and gave it back to Sánchez to thank her. The story makes Sánchez tear up. “I think when you give back it encourages someone else to give back. It’s a really incredible loop.” Later Nikko sent her a text: “Mom I just want you to know I’m proud of you.”

Sánchez’s kids are also invested in the Earth Fund. She says she recently got them excited by discussing the Earth Fund’s investment in methane-free cows, as well as a $400 million program that seeks to add green space to urban centers that have grown hotter due to lack of shade canopy.

“It’s inspiring for our staff to see that level of interest,” says Andrew Steer, the Earth Fund’s president and CEO. “She’s involved in the nitty-­gritty.” Sánchez and Bezos recently hosted a retreat for key staff at their Malibu home. “We really want to do the most we can with the dollars that we put into things,” says Sánchez. “It’s not about just giving the money away. It’s about being involved.” Of the 2024 recipient of the Courage & Civility Award (in the past it’s gone to Dolly Parton, Van Jones, and José Andrés), Sánchez will only say, “It’s really exciting, we’re narrowing it down. We can’t announce who it is yet, but this is something very close to our hearts.”

Sánchez is undaunted by the question of how she reconciles her own carbon footprint with her environmental work. “I think Jeff and I really are focusing on the long-term commitment to climate, and we’re extremely optimistic about it. Ten billion is just the beginning.” She says they also use green aviation fuel when possible and that Koru can sail using only wind power. “We’ve done it and it is magical.”

“This is the most important work I’ve ever done, ever,” she adds about the philanthropic investments. She was honored for them at a This Is About Humanity gala at the end of the summer, an event that acted as a back-to-school mixer for Hollywood’s social worlds and cemented Sánchez, in a clinging red knit dress, as a face of philanthropy in Los Angeles. “As a little girl I never thought I would be up here,” Sánchez said in her speech. She went on to recount her childhood in Albuquerque (she and Bezos each giddily tell me they were born at the same hospital six years apart). Sánchez recalls her grandmother, who worked two jobs, loading her into her Ford Marquis at 5 a.m. and driving to clean houses while young Sánchez slept in the backseat. Sánchez would then get dressed for school in the bathroom of the restaurant where her grandmother was the manager. Her parents separated when she was young. Her father is a pilot and mechanic who owned a flight school; her mother, who also had a pilot’s license, worked for the city of Albuquerque. Sánchez says she “got lost in the school system” due to undiagnosed dyslexia, and her grandmother saw her struggling and taught her what she thought she needed to know: how to cook, how to clean a house, and how to sew. Unable to afford department store dresses, Sánchez made her own clothes, including her red puff-sleeve prom dress. “So fashion has always been a fun thing for me.”

At 19, Sánchez enrolled in El Camino College, where her broadcast journalism professor, Lori Medigovich, helped her get a handle on her dyslexia. “I’ve taught thousands of students, but Lauren was memorable because she seemed so driven. Lauren knew exactly what she wanted to do,” says Medigovich, who also helped Sánchez transfer to USC on a scholarship. “She literally changed the trajectory of my life,” says Sánchez, tearing up again. “By the way, I never used to cry. This is him. I blame you.”

“I made her vulnerable and soft,” says Bezos with more than a hint of pride.

Sánchez’s most high profile gig in her TV career was with Good Day LA on Fox 11, which she co-hosted for six years, waking up at 4:30 a.m. and being home for school pickup. In the early years she would take Nikko to work with her, just as her grandmother did. “Growing up it did feel like it was me and her against the world,” says Nikko.

Kris Jenner remembers Sánchez as the face of her news when she would have her coffee in the morning. She then met Sánchez when she and her then husband were peddling their “Superfit with Kris and Bruce Jenner” line of stair-climbers. They were reintroduced a few years ago by LA superconnector Michael Kives over dinner at Bezos’s estate in Beverly Hills.

“We know they will be in our lives forever,” says Jenner, who with partner Corey Gamble enjoys date nights with the soon-to-be Bezoses, such as attending Coachella last April and, more recently, the Beyoncé Renaissance World Tour birthday concert with their kids, including Kim and Khloé and North West, and Sánchez’s teenagers. Jenner says Sánchez knew the words to every song.

“She’ll make sure everyone is up to speed about what’s happening in the world,” says Jenner, noting Sánchez recently sent an article about the Maui wildfires to their group text (Jenner declined to name its members). Bezos and Sánchez, who also have a home on Maui, pledged $100 million to rebuilding efforts. “She has more energy than I do, which is really annoying,” says Jenner.

Bezos later explains that there are five metal anniversary displays that will function like traditional cuckoo clocks chiming at one year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years, and 10,000 years. “The whole point of the clock,” explains Bezos, “is after a few hundred years, like all old things, it will take on a certain kind of respect.”

“Is that why you respect me so much?” jokes Sánchez, and they both erupt in laughter

“She’s dyslexic. She thinks she’s 35,” says Bezos.

Does Sánchez have any secrets for aging gracefully? “It’s really simple.” She cites the MEDS acronym—meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep—personally adding sunscreen to the end of it. (She wears Summer Fridays.)

“I don’t ever think, Wow, I’m going to be 54 in December and I’m getting married. It is all happening. We’re excited about the future.”

“I think there’s an interesting thing to try and do,” says Bezos thoughtfully, “which is to be excited about the future and to live in the present. All the future is built right here, in this moment.”

Sánchez lifts off the bar stool. “Okay, shall we?”

“Let’s do it,” says Bezos, threading his hand in Sánchez’s.

“But you have to fly us home,” she says with a giggle.

Bezos leads her toward the helicopter outside. “I can do that.”

In this story: hair, Chris McMillan; makeup, Buster Knight.