It's not easy being a billionaire nerd. Just ask Sean Parker. When details recently leaked about the Napster/Facebook/Spotify mogul's lavish plans to marry singer Alexandra Lenas at a resort in California, many jumped to the conclusion that Parker, 33, would host a medieval-themed event. A big, fat geek wedding, if you will.
It didn't help that he had sent out engraved save-the-date rocks and hired Ngila Dickson, the Oscar-winning costume designer of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, to outfit the couple's more than 250 guests with custom attire.
Parker, whose net worth is estimated to hover around $2 billion, quickly took to Facebook and Twitter to set the record straight. "This is not a theme wedding and there will be nothing 'medieval' about it," he announced. "Ngila Dickson created a series of outfits that are based on modern suits and dresses with some elements of Victorian flair." What he did not address, however, was the cost of the affair, reportedly about $9 million. It is being overseen by the celebrity event designer Preston Bailey, who also orchestrated Donald Trump's 2005 wedding. Considering that Parker has committed to spending $350,000 on a temporary dance floor, it is easy to see how things might add up.
Even if Parker's budget is a million or two less, it's a huge expenditure, even by Hollywood standards. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, for instance, were reported to have spent an estimated $2 million on their wedding. And in Silicon Valley, ostentatious displays tend to draw more scorn than awe. Alexia Tsotsis, an editor of the San Francisco-based industry website TechCrunch, says: "Outliers like Parker serve as a warning for the rest of the group. Everyone here just wants to give off the aura that they're working hard." That may explain why tech titans typically go small or secretive when marrying. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Ellison of Oracle were both married in low-key backyard ceremonies. If they prefer a destination wedding, like Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or even Bill Gates, their choice is usually a lush private island with enough security to thwart interlopers by air or sea.
According to Alice Marwick, the author of Status Update: Celebrity and Attention in Web 2.0, "There's a sense that you're doing something good for the world, and that doesn't go hand-in-hand with flashy weddings or buying a Prada backpack." Clearly, Zuckerberg wasn't swayed by any traditional trappings. When he married his college sweetheart, Priscilla Chan, in the backyard of their California home, guests dined on simple Mexican fare and sushi from local restaurants. Some speculated that the simple affair was a strategic business decision: Just 24 hours before the wedding, the then-28-year-old saw his net worth skyrocket to an estimated $19 billion after the frenzied initial public offering of Facebook.
The event designer Alison Hotchkiss, who works with many Google and Apple executives and who planned the 2007 wedding of Evan Williams, a founder of Twitter, offers another explanation: "Their money is mostly hard-earned, so they have more respect for it." When Google's Brin married Anne Wojcicki on a private island in the Bahamas in 2007, the beach wedding could not have been more casual. Later that year, his business partner, Page, followed suit by commandeering Necker Island, the Caribbean property of Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson, for his own wedding. But with a guest list of 600 that included Bono, and with Branson acting as best man, the event was decidedly higher profile.
The hush-hush private island wedding has a history among the tech set. On January 1, 1994, Gates married Melinda French, a Microsoft manager, on a cliff on the 12th tee of a golf course on the Hawaiian island of Lanai (an island now largely owned by none other than Larry Ellison). The event doesn't sound so elaborate until you know that Gates booked all of the rental cars and hotel rooms on the island to bar any onlookers.
Marwick of Fordham sees these tech titans as a burgeoning genre of celebrities. "They're young, they're rich and they're building products that everybody uses. College students want to emulate these people."
If they recognise them, that is. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2010 found that only 41 per cent of Americans knew that the tech luminary Steve Jobs was the head of Apple at that time. Incidentally, Jobs married Laurene Powell in 1991 in an intimate Zen Buddhist ceremony at a hotel in Yosemite National Park.
©2013 The New York Times
