La Serenissima has seen its share of oddities in a thousand years of history, but never quite like this: a giant pajama party in the heart of Venice's Arsenale. This is where the galleys of the Republic once set sail and returned in the days of Titian and Veronese. But here, Vivaldi was nowhere to be heard. DJs at the turntables kept celebrities in silk gowns dancing until dawn. The evening of Saturday, June 28, closed the celebrity event of the year: the wedding of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and television presenter Lauren Sanchez. Three days of celebrations for a union worth more than $230 billion (€199 billion), the estimated fortune of Amazon's creator. Enough to buy far more than the city of Venice and its artistic treasures.

Bezos accumulated this fortune in just 30 years, since the founding of his online bookstore in 1994. He is not the only one to amass such wealth in so little time. Of the 10 richest people in the world, nine, all Americans, started from scratch and, except for Warren Buffett, all did so in the digital sector. In previous centuries, reaching even a tenth of these colossal sums would have required generations of heirs to accumulate.

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