About

Jeff Bezos Eating an Iguana refers to a series of jokes and memes featuring a viral photograph of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos eating a roasted iguana.

Origin

On March 10th, 2018, Jeff Bezos attended the Explorers Club Annual Dinner, where he accepted the Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Award.^[1]

Two days later, Bloomberg published an article about the dinner. In the article, they published the photograph of Bezos eating the iguana (shown below). They wrote, "The Amazon chief executive officer wasn’t the only billionaire at the glitzy event at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. West Coast industrial real estate tycoon Ed Roski and Frederik Paulsen, a Swedish pharmaceutical titan and pole explorer, perused the tarantula, cockroach and roasted iguana appetizers."^[2] According to Popular Science,^[4] the Explorers Club chose the menu comprised of invasive animals, including the iguana, that could be used for food, to highlight sustainability.

Spread

That day, Bloomberg's Twitter ^[3] account shared the image. The post received more than 120 retweets and 225 likes in one year (shown below, left).

Following the post, people began posting the jokes about the image. Twitter^[5] user @bourgeoisalien shared the photograph and wrote, "it's cool that this rat puke in a skin suit who makes $230,000 a minute, 262 million a day, and won't pay his worker's a living wage, jeff bezos, is eating an iguana and living up to every possible notion i had of what an evil sociopath billionaire looks and acts like." The tweet received more than 140 retweets and 360 likes in less than one year (shown below, center).

Later that year, Twitter^[6] account Humans of Late Capitalism posted the image within a thread about labor issues within Amazon warehouses (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References