A group of protesters from an organization called Everyone Hates Elon have stuck it to Jeff Bezos by planting little fake pee bottles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the days before Monday’s Met Gala. Monday, at the event itself, there were more traditional protesters as well.
According to Fox News, Jeff Bezos avoided the red carpet on Monday and quietly went inside the event via some other entrance.
Honorary Chair, Lauren Sánchez Bezos arrives at the 2026 #MetGala pic.twitter.com/XIh9Zkoo4y
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) May 4, 2026
The explanation for the pee bottles, according to a statement posted on Instagram is that, “Jeff Bezos’s company Amazon is literally being sued for forcing workers to urinate in bottles.” There is indeed a proposed class action suit in Colorado over alleged “work policies that require its delivery drivers in Colorado to urinate in bottles in the back of delivery vans, defecate in bags, and, in many cases, to restrain themselves from using the bathroom at risk of serious health consequences.” When the suit was announced in 2023, Amazon declined to comment on the specifics.
The Met Gala, like the Oscars, started as a dinner for cultural elites, and then got out of hand. Now you can spark an international incident by not knowing who someone is at the Met Gala, and the House Ethics committee will investigate a dress someone wears there.
And now Jeff Bezos, the centibillionaire Amazon founder, and his wife Lauren Sanchez pay millions of dollars to be associated with the Gala—this year becoming the primary donors and honorary co-chairs of the event.
That’s unpleasant for anyone who reasonably does not care for Amazon’s gruesome alleged treatment of workers and contractors—including sometimes allegedly not allowing adequate time to pee in actual bathrooms. It’s something Amazon has denied, but then it ended up apologizing for the denial.
A good way to draw attention to this might be to protest at one of Amazon’s many physical locations, which people sometimes do. Another way would be to stage a funny protest in the lead-up to the Bezos-affiliated Met Gala, which, in addition to being a gala is also a fundraising event for the arts—which gives it a convenient, but real, veneer of kindness.
The fake pee bottles have a message on them that says “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala,” which everyone I know is doing whether they want to or not since they just don’t have the $100,000 it costs to get in. A smaller note at the bottom of the label says “Relax, it’s just water and food coloring.”
The pee bottle stunt is cute, but seems like it was mainly just annoying for people who work at the museum. Still, the protesters got their message out, and they may have successfully put Bezos off of making a red carpet entrance. Plus it would be hard to do a funny stunt protest every time Jeff Bezos has a party on the largest sailing yacht in the world, which he owns, and which is so big it has its own little side-yacht. Though there were fresh rumors going around in the tabloids Monday that he wants to sell that because it attracts too much attention. Maybe someone planted pee bottles in that too.
