Taylor Swift’s extravagant-to-the-point-of madness wedding to Travis Kelce on July 3 was estimated to cost somewhere between $30 and $40 million dollars. The grotesque orgy of self-promotion and conspicuous consumption was a days-long celebration at Madison Square Garden with over 1,000 guests (the couple’s closest friends, of course), most of them also millionaires, and featured performances by the kinds of top musicians who refused to celebrate our 250th Anniversary because Trump Bad. The thing required $160,000 just for New York City street closures, permits and police.
Renting Madison Square Garden and transforming the arena for the ceremony and reception cost an estimated $5 million to $10 million. Another $5 million went to flowers and decorations. Catering was about $3 million.
Oh, and we must not forget about the lottery! The wedding featured an hour-long luxury raffle with prizes including Chanel handbags, Cartier watches and a vintage 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle. The mostly celebrity guests earned raffle tickets by playing skee-ball, mini golf, and football-themed carnival games.
I’m not making this up. I wish I were.
Now, me, I couldn’t care less how rich people choose to throw away their money. An exercise in “See, everybody, we’re RICH! RICH I SAY!“
AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
…is repulsive and doesn’t reflect well on the perps, but as an exercise in egotism, narcissism and waste, it’s relatively harmless.
What does bother me is that the same people who will crowd into Taylor Swift concerts and buy her records will then frequent No Kings rallies when no one has emulated the excesses of 18th Century royalty like Swift and her NFL star hubby, then cheer on Bernie and his fellow travelers as they attack Elon Musk, who never in his life as a billionaire or trillionaire or whatever he is has ever spent his money as stupidly and selfishly as the Swifts. Musk actually builds, invests, and creates jobs with his money.
Hypocrisy doesn’t begin to describe how perverse this double standard is.
Ethics Alarms 
Skee-ball? It already sounds like 100% more fun than any wedding I’ve been to.
Sad but true.
I paid zero attention – I was more interested in photographing the USS Nimitz in its rare appearance in the area and getting ready for the Parade of Sail. These vacuous rich people want to indulge, then let them. At least some honest people are making money off this.
Wow, that’s a LOT of money for a wedding. If they remain married 40 years, the wedding was a cool million per. In 2005, we spent $2,500 for our wedding…total…including rings. I know it sounds like I’m bragging, but I’m not.
I can’t recall that I’ve ever been to a really elaborate/expensive wedding, though I’ve been to some nice ones. I suppose – like most everything else – the evil capitalists figured out how to turn a wedding ceremony between two people, a preacher, and a couple of witnesses into something with a marketing plan. It now requires a planner, a caterer, a baker, a florist, decorators, a venue with staff, and a DJ or a band. And in a sense, these are all good things. They keep people working and gainfully employed.
I suppose the Kelce/Swift wedding had (and did) those things…just on a scale most of us could never do. But at what point does it just become excessive? Is it this one? The Bezos wedding where some town (or something or other) is getting rented? What if Musk wants to get married on Mars? Our host’s phrase “orgy of self-promotion” has to come into play at some point…the point where a ceremony ceases to be about the marriage and becomes a vehicle for flaunting one’s wealth. I would agree that this wedding crosses that threshold.
The penultimate paragraph was spot-on. I don’t think Elizabeth Warren choked on her peace pipe when she heard what the Kelce/Swift wedding cost, and she certainly didn’t don the war paint to go on-camera to pan it (unless I missed that somewhere). Bernie Sanders’ lament that “Swift obviously isn’t paying anywhere near her fair share of taxes?”…nowhere heard. AOC’s rants about the rich oligarchy living large on the backs of the proletariat?…heck, it’s possible she was a guest at the wedding. Swift’s a Democrat billionaire who doesn’t like Trump, so lavishly spending as much money on a wedding as it takes to feed the starving children in Nigeria for half a year is fine to those who are disgusted by how other elites live.
Marriage is a sacred institution, ordained by God. So I hope somewhere in the midst of all the pomp and glitz and Six Flags of Wedding Cake, the sanctity and seriousness of what they were doing was not lost. It certainly wasn’t missed in the raffle by the God that created it.
A lot of lefties seem to like her for some reason, so I suspect she will get a pass for this. She actually does this weird marking ploy where she portrays herself as a common person who happens to be rich rather than someone who was very privileged from the beginning.
She grew up solidly middle class in Wyomissing, Pa. across the street from my moot court partner and her husband and daughter, who was best friends with Taylor. Her father is/was a Merrill Lynch guy, but I think just a retail broker, not an investment banker. But yes, now she is quite evidently as rich as Croesus.
She and her tight end fiancé lost me at the point where they decided to have their wedding inside Madison Square Garden. What?
My favorite Taylor Swift line was when upon her endorsing Kamala Harris and encouraging Swifties to vote for Harris, some wag observed, “Should anyone be taking any advice from a woman who’s made her entire career composing and performing songs about young women making bad decisions?”
Also, has she made jocks cool again? Didn’t she only date good looking musicians? This is kind of surprising, sort of a contemporary version of Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe. And that worked out well.
“They spent forty million on the wedding”
“Really? That’s too much. We’re Methodists, twenty million is our limit.”
From Crazy Rich Asians, of course.
As a free-market capitalist I celebrate rich people actually spending their money. Every single business that was paid to produce this extravaganza benefitted, as did their employees. If the economic multiplier is still relevant, that $40 million becomes $100 million within the economy. I’m guessing that is a far greater benefit to New Yorkers than if the Kelces donated that much to charities, so many of which are grifts.
As for the hypocrisy of fans and detractors – Jack nailed it.
Wait, Taylor Swift got married? Who knew?