Why the Real Housewives of Tech are Getting Creepy Statues

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently shared his excitement over an epic outdoor statue that he commissioned to capture the likeness of his wife Priscilla Chan. Created by artist Daniel Arsham, the nearly seven-foot sculpture combines antiquity (bronze patina) with the post-modern (shiny silver) to create a sense of what Arsham calls “fictional archaeology.”

In the caption of the post, Zuckerberg explained that he was “Bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.” But it’s possible that Zuckerberg was inspired by a different source.

In May, 2023, fellow tech billionaire Jeff Bezos unveiled his $500-dollar mega yacht Koru—with a figurehead that the press identified as a dead ringer for his fiancée Lauren Sanchez.

Sanchez later rejected this notion, claiming to Vogue that the masthead actually portrayed Freyja, the Norse goddess of love, fertility, war, and gold. The proof that Sanchez offered was that the breasts of the masthead were too small to have been modeled after hers.

Still, at the very least, we can agree that Bezos has a type. And the attention generated by the masthead may have kicked off a billionaire arms race to memorialize one’s beloved. Now, historically, a portrait was enough. Andy Warhol churned out screen printings of industrialists’ wives at a pace so dizzying that his studio was called “the factory.”

Statues are next-level works of art. They take up more space and are built to withstand the elements. Chan’s garden statue may be pooped on by birds and Sanchez’s figurehead will forever be splashed in the face by sea water, but a hundred years from now, long after their real counterparts are gone from this earth, these figures will endure.

Now that Bezos and Zuckerberg have started the trend, it’s fun to think about who will follow.

Probably not Elon Musk, who would have to choose between multiple procreating partners, including Justine Wilson, who is the mother of Musk’s five eldest children (the then-married couple used IVF to have a set of twins and then triplets). Next, he married author Talulah Riley. Twice. Then Musk dated musician Grimes, who mothered three more children, overlapping with Neuralink employee Shivon Zilis who gave birth to three more Musk babies.

He’s rich enough, so maybe he could commission a fountain with all of them.

Musk’s new bestie Donald Trump is probably too cheap to lay out the money for a statue of his wife, Melania. Fortunately, the people of Slovenia have erected a monument to the former First Lady in a village near Sevnica where she grew up. The likeness is uncanny!

The most likely to commission a statue is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. He has the cash and an extensive sculpture collection, so throwing in a bust of his girlfriend Nikita Khan makes sense.

This trend has precedent. In 2003, polo-playing publisher Peter Brant commissioned a work from artist Maurizio Cattelan of Brant’s then-wife model Stephanie Seymour. The result envisioned Seymour as a prized moose head and the project was nicknamed “Trophy Wife.”

Twenty years later, Kendall Jenner and the artist teamed up to recreate the pose for the cover of Garage Magazine.

But the true OG of enshrining one’s partner is Queen Victoria, who spent the equivalent of about $23 million dollars of 1872 public money to create The Albert Memorial for her beloved prince. This Gothic Revival monstrosity took 10 years to build and features a 14-foot high gilded statue of the Prince.

To Queen Victoria’s credit, she thought of two advantages that both Bezos and Zuckerberg missed.

First, the statue is seated, which seems like a far more restful position than having to stand for eternity. And second, she added a roof over her husband’s head to protect him from the rain and bird shit.

Now that’s true love.