It was a low-key proposal. No, really, it was. Just a 20-carat diamond worth a reported £2.5 million popped under a pillow on Jeff Bezos’s £400 million superyacht earlier this year. The new Mrs Bezos-to-be, helicopter pilot and former TV journalist Lauren Sánchez, 53, was recounting the story: “When he opened the box, I think I blacked out a bit,” she told US Vogue.

Bezos lived a comparatively quiet life before divorcing his first wife, MacKenzie Scott, in 2019. Despite becoming one of the richest men in the world over the course of their 25-year marriage, he remained not dissimilar to the young bookseller, Star Trek fan and monobrowed tech entrepreneur Scott met in the early-1990s. 

Scott was heavily involved in the early years of Amazon, which Bezos founded from a garage in Seattle in 1994, and the couple dedicated their days to building the business. Scott drove their four children to school in a Honda, then dropped Bezos at the office, and the couple guarded their privacy and that of their family closely.

Now the tech titan closely resembles Vin Diesel and has fully moved into the media spotlight; in a joint portrait of Bezos and Sanchéz, taken for the December issue of the magazine, the only thing as eye-catching as her enormous pink diamond is Bezos’s left bicep (some users of X – formerly Twitter – have even suggested it is Photoshopped). 

According to the Forbes “real time” rich list, he is the third richest man in the world, behind Elon Musk and Bernard Arnault, the chairman of luxury goods behemoth  LVMH. 

In the book Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone, a friend of Bezos says the entrepreneur was “like a kid in a candy store” when he finally stepped into the world of the super-rich. 

He and Sanchéz, who co-hosted the TV show Good Day LA for six years, were first romantically linked in 2019, while Sanchéz was in the middle of a divorce from Patrick Whitesell, the American businessman and entertainment titan.

Bezos frequently features on her Instagram feed – one photo of him getting out of the sea in the summer is captioned “is it just me, or is it hot outside?” Sanchéz is “100 per cent” taking his name and is “looking forward to being Mrs Bezos”.

The couple celebrated their engagement at sea with Leonardo DiCaprio and Bill Gates. They share date nights with Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner and her partner Corey Gamble, and had a second Beverly Hills engagement party attended by Kim Kardashian and Oprah. Previously media-shy, he is now “the life of the party,” Sanchéz said. “He’s just extremely enthusiastic and extremely funny. He can be really goofy.” She also described him as “a monster in the gym”.

Last year, Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon chief executive in mid-2021, revealed he plans to give away the majority of his £101 billion fortune over the course of his lifetime to charitable causes including initiatives to combat climate change. But it is clear he is spending a portion of his billions on the odd boy’s toy, too. 

There is the private jet, a Gulfstream G650ER (just one, though, which is relatively modest), and the aforementioned superyacht on which he proposed to Sanchéz. Called Koru (the name is Maori for “new beginnings”), it is reportedly the largest sailing yacht in the world and travels with its own $75 million support vessel. 

On the front is a curvaceous figurehead. This prompted feverish speculation that it was carved in Sanchéz’s image, although she has revealed it is actually one of Bezos’s favourite mythological figures: Freyja, the Norse goddess of war, love and fertility.

The Vogue cover shoot took place at the West Texas ranch where Bezos holidays and has built his Blue Origin space facility. Sanchéz tells the interviewer she was present for the first crewed flight to space in 2021 and had baseball caps made, embroidered with the couple’s favourite saying: “Love you to space and back.” She plans to go to space herself next year.

The ranch, purchased in 2004, is filled with oddities such as a vast clock, 500ft below the ground, which boasts gigantic titanium gears and a 10,000lb bronze and concrete pendulum and is designed to chime at one year, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years and 10,000 years. Sanchéz is photographed reclining beside it, in a sequin dress. 

The ranch also has a space-themed bar where Bezos likes to make margaritas. Last year, they held Thanksgiving there, in the “Bezos family compound,” and Sanchéz had equestrian chaps and jackets made for all the guests for a horseback camping trip.

Like other tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, Bezos has also turned his attention to longevity and anti-ageing research, and has reportedly invested in Altos Labs, a start-up focused on “cellular rejuvenation programming”. 

Despite all this, Sanchéz insists their life is “pretty normal … daily life mostly revolves around our kids”. They take it in turns to make morning coffee, which Sanchéz drinks in a mug from Amazon which reads, “Woke up sexy as hell again” – a gift from Bezos. 

She splits her time between LA, where her two children from her previous marriage go to school, and Bezos’s home on Lake Washington, near Seattle, although he has announced plans to relocate to Miami. Sanchéz also has a son from a relationship with the former American football player Tony Gonzalez. Bezos’s four children from his previous marriage are at college.

As for the wedding? “We’re still thinking about [it],” she said, “what it’s going to be. Is it going to be big? Is it going to be overseas? We don’t know yet. We’ve only been engaged five months!” Low-key, no, really.