A Billionaire’s Week
Cuts through the week's noise.
In this week's newsletter: Jude Jones, editor-in-chief of GAY45, cuts through the week's noise exclusively for subscribers, plus our essential recommendations.
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A Billionaire’s Week
By Jude Jones, editor-in-chief
It was a relief for the headlines this week to be dominated not by Trump’s cosmos of warmongering egotism but by some escapist tat: the 2026 Met Gala, more packed with leather daddies than your nearest back room. Of course, that escapism ends when you start to peruse the guest list, which looks more like a list of invitees to one of Peter Thiel’s Palantir talks about the coming of the Antichrist.
There was all your worst, red-pill-swallowing, Red-Bull-guzzling ex-classmates’ favourites: Mark Zuckerberg in an overpriced prom suit, Google co-founder Sergey Brin -- who has called the UN antisemitic for its condemnations of Israeli violence in Palestine -- in a “wilting pussy bow”. Meanwhile, perennial paladins of the Met like Zendaya and Meryl Streep, star of the recent The Devil Wears Prada sequel, were conspicuously absent.
Which brings us to the Dark Lord of the Met Gala 2026: Jeff Bezos, who served as an honorary co-chair with his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos. The pair, whose combined net worth is higher than the GDP of Ukraine, have been making insidious creeps into the fashion-sphere and are even rumoured to be eyeing an acquisition of Vogue -- having already ruined the Washington Post, the book-selling industry, Whole Foods, and almost anything else Bezos’ stubby hands have touched, like a faecal-matter Midas who turns all he prods to shit.
Back home in Europe, the news was contrastingly -- and again, refreshingly! -- tinged with a mild optimism. The fall of the Orbán regime in Hungary has cleared the way for new EU funding and military support to Ukraine, which the Viktator had previously blocked. And the UK -- whose Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is still tail-between-legs over the egregious Mandelson-Epstein affair -- edges ever closer to its European divorcee after watching its honey-bunny, Trump-era America, turn into a schizo-temperamental orange-hued fat-berg. Til death to us part -- unless, of course, fleeing imminent death from a bomb-happy maniac of a significant other, then whenever’s convenient works too.
Elsewhere, Botswana overturned a colonial-era anti-gay law which had prohibited same-sex intimacy.
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