Bezos and Leo
The funniest memes from Jeff Bezos' encounter with Leonardo "Steal Yo Girl" DiCaprio
Yo, Trung here. Thanks for subscribing to SatPost, a Saturday round-up of funny memes and tweets from the internet (def share if you have a laugh).
Today, we’re talking Bezos and Leo.
There are few moments like watching the birth of a new meme format. Well, that happened last Sunday when this clip dropped:
The footage is from the awkwardly named Los Angeles Museum of Art (LAMCA) Art + Film Gala.
Here is the cast of characters:
Leonardo DiCaprio: Our generation’s Jack Nicholson and noted Hollywood player
Lauren Sanchez: Media personality and Jeff Bezos’ partner
Jeff Bezos: The artist formerly known as the richest person in the world (🥈)
The first thing that came to mind when I saw the video was the meme of “the guy holding hands with one girl but looking at the other girl”.
The energy is identical:
Naturally, Twitter latched onto this development and the jokes came rushing in:
The next day, Bezos responded with a jokey threat that went viral (turns out Bezos and Leo are “long-time friends”):
The tweet hits because Bezos has historically been very quiet on social:
@JeffBezos has 268 tweets ever (as a point of comparison, a South African centi-billionaire — that goes by the handle @ElonMusk — has ~300 tweets in just the last 6 months)
The Bezos social activity is really picking up, though:
@JeffBezos had zero tweets from March 2020 through August 2021
But has 23 tweets since mid-September 2021
The uptick in activity on Twitter (and Instagram) is very co-ordinated, according to The Information. Since stepping down as Amazon CEO, Bezos is doing space stuff and his PR team is working overtime to “transform his profile from awkward tech executive to swashbuckling innovator and fun guy”.
Bezos has a team running his social but gives “approval” for content.
Somewhat surprisingly, Operation Fun Guy did not include the Leo zinger. Bezos went rogue on that one and the tweet “baffled multiple people who have worked closely with Bezos” (#FreeBezos).
I have an amateurish theory on the divergence of Twitter usage between Bezos and Musk:
When Bezos first discovered the internet, he thought “this is growing at +2300% a year” and set out to find a business plan to capitalize
When Musk found out about the internet, he thought humanity would have a “nervous system and access to any part of humanity’s knowledge from anywhere”
Clearly, very different first impressions on what “the internet” means (with Musk’s view much more consistent with someone who tweets random memes all day).
However, it looks like Bezos is slowly plugging into the nervous system…which probably means more new meme templates to come.
SIDE NOTE: If you want some old school Leo stories, read this profile from Complex. Leo’s crew in the mid-90s included David Blaine and Toby Maguire. Even before Leo went nuclear with Titanic, they were major players and the group of friends were given the nickname P***y Posse (you can’t make this up).
Meme dump
Ed Note: This tweet proves that one of the most impactful uses for statistical analysis is s**tposting.
And some other random ones that made me laugh:
Quibble: LACMA is the LA County Museum of Art. (It's also the LA County Medical Association, which has occasionally been hilarious for reasons I won't go into.)