The Met Gala raised a record $42 million as Silicon Valley paid—and as celebs protested Jeff Bezos

The Met Gala is usually packed to the brim with celebrities looking to show off their best iterations of each year’s theme. It’s an event where your stylist can make it or break it, and can even become celebrities of their own accord. This year’s gala, however, saw a new type of celebrity take center stage: Silicon Valley. Tech money powered the Met Gala to its biggest fundraising year ever. The 2026 event raised a record $42 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, up from last year’s then-record-breaking $31 million. The lead sponsors were not a fashion house or a Hollywood studio, but Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who contributed a reported $10 million. Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, Snapchat, and Shopify all purchased tables at $350,000 each, and individual tickets hit $100,000, up from roughly $75,000 in 2025. It’s a notable shift for an event traditionally defined by supermodels, actors, and musicians. For decades, the Met Gala guest list read like a roster of entertainment and fashion royalty, one where Rihanna’s dress makes the front page and designers compete for which celebrity will wear their look up the famous steps. This year, it was tech CEOs and
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