Wedding in Portofino for the manager Nathalie Dompé and the billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya. Elon Musk was also at the reception

Portofino – There are cases in which the guest becomes more important than the bride and groom. Even when the bride and groom are as famous as Nathalie Dompémanager of the homonymous Italian pharmaceutical industry (the best-known product is the painkiller Oki) and Chamath Palihapitiya billionaire originally from Sri Lanka, founder of Social Capital, former vice president of Facebook and today become the most dangerous rival of Mark Zuckerberg. One of those cases took place in the late afternoon of today in Portofino, Castello Brown, where among the guests of the couple was expected Elon Musk. She was not present at the ceremony but – they assure – she then attended the reception.

Accompanied by six bodyguards, arriving from Mykonos, where he spent a short holiday, and obviously surrounded by absolute confidentiality. Musk is with longtime girlfriend and singer Grimes, stage name of Claire Elise Boucher. Second in the ranking of billionaires behind Bernard Arnault (211 billion against 180 billion of personal assets), Musk is a friend of the groom, with whom he shares a passion for technology and innovation. And speaking of challenges between rich people, surely there are no hard feelings between Musk and Arnault, given that the owner of Tesla and Twitter stayed overnight at the Hotel Splendido, which coincidentally belongs to the holding company Lvmh – an acronym for Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy – whose major shareholder is precisely Arnault. All to be confirmed, but possible given the protagonists, the news circulating today about a meeting between Musk and Arnault at the Splendido. The handshake between the two, if it had been staged, would therefore be worth 391 billion. Certainly the second richest man in the world is a guest in the hotel of the first richest man in the world: a combination possible only in Portofino.

Returning to the wedding of the year, the two newly weds chose to get married in Castle Brown, reached with the famous VIP lift, departing from the Umberto I pier, around 6.30pm. Here they found highly selected family members and guests, as well as the deputy mayor Giorgio D’Alia, who officiated the ceremony with the nonchalance of someone who is, in any case, used to VIPs of all kinds and from all over the world. In the case of the bride, however, the acquaintance with Portofino goes back a long way, given that since 2010 her father Sergio has owned a beautiful villa in via Odero. For this reason, the choice fell on the village, which the new groom also likes very much. The bride looked beautiful and after all the young 33-year-old woman, she is not only a captain of industry: she is also a professional model who has walked for Giorgio Armani and posed for Vogue. He is casual elegance and the magnetic gaze of someone who has been able to climb the peaks of the Silicon Valley social media industry, as well as the Nasdaq in New York.

Among other curiosities, it must be said that in addition to the symbolic place of Liguria, the newly weds, who have been engaged since 2018 and have already had a child in common for three years, also wanted a local menu with catering signed by the Da O Vittorio Vernissage restaurant, a centenary restaurant in Recco, which for some years has often taken care of the catering of Castello Brown. Cooks and waiters prepared and served prawns of Santa and also signed a confidentiality clause with a fine of 25,000 euros for anyone who disclosed photos or videos of the ceremony.