As the leading men of tech line up to lick president-elect Donald Trump’s boots—donating extravagant sums to his inauguration, shutting down criticism of him in the news outlets they own—it’s a timely moment to re-consider the women standing by their sides (or, in some cases, who have split off). These tech wives and girlfriends—“TWAGs,” in tabloid parlance—offer insights into the men with whom they are paired, and reflect many Americans’ own discombobulated relationship with politics, money and the attention economy.
As the current men of tech age, their partners are increasingly split into two groups: the first wives and the usually-younger women who replaced them. It’s not a neat dividing line, but in general, the elder cohort have either stayed out of the limelight or made names for themselves doing good. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, has used her fortune to support progressive causes and fight climate change. Mackenzie Scott, a writer who sacrificed much of her career for her ex-husband, Jeff Bezos, took her divorce settlement and quickly set about giving it away.
There’s more philanthropic efforts to be seen in the work of Priscilla Chan, the wife of Mark Zuckerberg, a doctor who runs the couple’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or of Melinda French Gates, who has expanded her portfolio in recent years, while focusing especially on reproductive rights and health services for women in need in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. French Gates, notably, has become far more out-front about supporting abortion rights than she was while married to Bill Gates and attached to the Gates Foundation.
Some of the newer TWAGs, on the other hand, seem less interested in using their good fortune—and their partners’ fortunes—for good. They’re more focused on the all-American aspiration of simply reveling in obscene wealth. Can you blame them? No. But also yes. The unofficial mascot of this group is undoubtedly Lauren Sanchez, Bezos’ current fiancée, who embodies what is sometimes called the Mar-a-Lago look: fillers and hair extensions, breast implants and spray tans. A former entertainment and sports reporter, a licensed pilot with an aviation business and a children’s book author, among other talents, Sanchez seems to be heartily enjoying the yachts and the parties, even if she has faced criticism for not always dressing appropriately for the occasions.
Of course, Bezos isn’t the only tech billionaire who has made eyebrow-raising romantic decisions in middle age. Eighty-year-old Oracle founder Larry Ellison is on his sixth wife, this one several decades his junior; Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s second ex-wife, Nicole Shanahan was RFK Jr’s running mate, and largely funded his campaign. (Shanahan has also been romantically tied to Elon Musk.)
Assessing relationships like Sanchez’s and Bezos’s is a landmine for feminist critics. It is now broadly considered antifeminist, even misogynist, to suggest a professionally hot woman might be dating a mediocre-looking older man for his money, and that there may be something slightly icky about that. Those mediocre-looking men rarely come in for such criticism, incidentally, though their behavior is clearly far ickier—seeking out hot women who can slot into their lives (and likely out of them too, in time) rather than ostensibly equal partners. And that some of these men, like the recently-renovated buff space cowboy Bezos, seem to be searching for a lost youth suggests that there may be deeper issues at play.
Such unbalanced relationships seem not unlike the arrangement we see between the president-elect and his former-model third wife, Melania. But what appears to be a consciously transactional coupling on first glance may be more complicated when the scales are weighted from the get-go. Money like Bezos’s brings real power, and that doesn’t typically lose its value with time alone. It compounds itself. Female beauty and sex appeal, though, diminish by the day, at least when defined by the emotionally immature male gaze.
This is perhaps why you see many wives and girlfriends of wealthy and influential public men—from Sanchez to Donald Trump Jr.’s former fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle—not just investing huge sums in surgeries and beautification procedures but making significant efforts to capture the public’s attention.
This hard work serves multiple purposes. It may distract from a partner’s far more nefarious actions; if we’re talking about Lauren Sanchez in a bikini, we may not be talking about how Jeff Bezos has hobbled the venerable Washington Post, ostensibly to gain some advantage with Trump. Public prominence may keep a particular kind of wealthy man interested: Elon Musk, for example, seems to relish attention, and being tied to beautiful women may elevate his sense of himself as an attractive alpha male. (That’s quite a shift, I suspect, from how he has been perceived for much of his life.)
And for some women, it may also seem rational to use their relationship with prominent men to increase their value in the attention economy while they can: Even if the men leave, their ‘brand value’ might remain. They might not wind up a Kardashian, but they could become a Real Housewife, and that’s worth something.
If the Obama era brought us the era of the do-good billionaire, the Trump years seem to be offering many of America’s uber-wealthy the opportunity to be openly self-interested, sexually juvenile, morally cowardly, and frankly, flat-out gross. And the Trumpian ethos of misogyny and ostentatious grift has also allowed the women along for the ride—and maybe the alimony?—to act, and live, a lot more like their men: Nakedly invested in power, however they can grab it, at whatever cost it extracts, and however fleeting it might be.
