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, and Snapchat 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 founders drawing the attention.
The tech guest list
Snapchat cofounder Evan Spiegel, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, OpenAI head of partnerships Charles Porch, and Amazon executives Christine Beauchamp and Jenny Freshwater all walked the red carpet. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended the Met Gala for the first time, though he and Bezos both opted to skip the carpet and entered the museum quietly. Lauren Sánchez Bezos, however, did walk, wearing Schiaparelli.
The Met Gala’s connection to tech is not brand new: Amazon first sponsored the event in 2012, and Apple, Instagram, Yahoo, and TikTok have all been involved in later years. But in 2026, tech took center stage: It was the first year a tech figure served as lead sponsor, and the first time multiple major tech companies bought tables at the same event.
When Vogue‘s former editor-in-chief Anna Wintour took over as chair in 1995, tables cost around $15,000 (about $32,000 when adjust for inflation) and individual tickets were in the low thousands. The guest list was built around the fashion and entertainment industries. The gala’s record-breaking year came with Silicon Valley at the center, rather than a major fashion brand or celebrity co-chair from film or music.
This year’s theme was “Costume Art,” with the dress code “Fashion Is Art.” Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and Wintour co-chaired the evening, which also inaugurated the new Condé M. Nast Galleries at the museum. The $42 million raised will fund the exhibitions, acquisitions, and operations at the Costume Institute, the only department at the Met that must be entirely self-funded.
Outside the event, plenty of protestors noted tech’s presence at the Gala. An activist group posted “Boycott the Bezos Met Ball” signs across New York and projected slogans onto buildings near Bezos’ $120 million penthouse.
One of the videos shown on his residence featured a 72-year-old Amazon warehouse worker chastising Bezos for the lavish event while most workers live paycheck to paycheck. Mark Ruffalo, who has not attended the Met Gala since 2012, was a collaborator in the Instagram video. Singer Olivia Rodrigo, who attended the Gala for the previous three years but was absent for this year’s, also liked the video.
Protesters organized a counter-event called the Ball Without Billionaires and included workers from Bezos-owned Amazon, Whole Foods, and The Washington Post in attendance.
The protests also took over online with celebrities. When someone on social media made a video saying celebrities shouldn’t see wearing an “ICE OUT” pin to the gala as a form of protest, Taraji P. Henson, who has previously attended the Gala, opted to skip this year’s event and commented on the video: “I am so confused by some [people] that are going. I am just like WTF ARE WE DOING?” Bella Hadid, who also attended the gala previously, liked the social media video and skipped out on this year’s event.
