Keeping it Together: TikTok hates this billionaire's wedding
A billionaire's luxury Egyptian wedding has gone viral − and not in a good way.
Hello! My name is Charlie, and I'm a wellness reporter here at Paste BN. This week, I looked into the backlash toward the viral TikTok video of Bilt Rewards CEO Ankur Jain and former WWE wrestler Erika Hammond's lavish wedding and what the resentment reveals about how people are feeling in the current economic climate.
Jain, who has a net worth of $1.2 billion according to Forbes, and Hammond seemed to spare no expense for their wedding, which featured a performance by acclaimed violinist Lindsey Stirling, a private tour of the pyramids and a special event at the Grand Egyptian Museum, which isn't yet fully open to the public.
That doesn't even cover the wedding day itself, which involved four different locations: one for the ceremony, one for the reception, one for dinner and one for the party. Among the celebrity attendees were Lance Bass, who took the mic to sing NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye," and Robin Thicke, who also gave a surprise performance.
People had a lot to share in the comments about how their own lives are going by comparison.
"I don't even have health insurance but that's cool," one person wrote. "I sold my couch to pay for food and gas," another wrote. "I just got a 47K hospital bill and no job because of surgery but that's pretty cool!" wrote another.
Experts told me the rich and famous should expect to stoke ire when they flaunt their opulence and that the strong reactions point to a deeper frustration the average person is feeling toward inflation, inequality and other economic issues.
"One thing that's a major driver of people's resentment is the feeling that people are not going to be better off than their parents," Erik Anderson, a licensed marriage and family therapist, says. "We kind of get into the psychology of comparison and how people measure themselves against other people in their community, including saying, 'Am I going to be better off than my parents or worse off than my parents?'"
You can find more from this story here and other interesting reads from our team below.