The Bezos of it all: The Met Gala’s billionaire moment

EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN FlashDoc’s new documentary “Behind the Bob: Vogue’s Anna Wintour,” explores Wintour’s decades-long reign as a defining force in global fashion and media. Watch tonight at 8pm EST on CNN, or stream right now on the CNN app. The annual Met Gala, which takes place this year on Monday, May 4, is always a lightning rod for controversy. Was Karl Lagerfeld too problematic to serve as a 2023 theme? Was TikTok, which had just been deemed a national security threat by the US government, an appropriate sponsor for 2024’s gala? And just how small can designers make Kim Kardashian’s waist? (This one comes up almost yearly.) But the 2026 gala, celebrating the accompanying exhibition, “Costume Art,” that gathers examples of clothed bodies from across the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curatorial departments, has proven especially contentious. Elected amid growing public anxiety over income inequality, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced he will skip the A-list gathering. “My focus is also on affordability and making the most expensive city in the United States affordable, and that’s what I’m looking to spend a lot of my time focused on,” he told news site Hell Gate last month. Then there is