Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and wife MacKenzie announce divorce on Twitter
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has announced he is separating from his wife of 25 years. What will this mean for the world’s wealthiest couple?
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie are calling it quits.
The billionaire has revealed the couple — who has been married for 25 years — has decided to go separate ways.
“As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends,” the 54-year-old wrote on Twitter.
The post suggests the split was on good terms, with Jeff noting: “We feel incredibly lucky to have found each other and deeply grateful for every one of the years we have been married to each other.
“If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again.”
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 9, 2019
The couple, who share three sons and a daughter they adopted from China, has received a lot of support on social media, with many crediting them for such an amicable split.
Your divorce sounds better than most people's marriages
— Robert Sharples (@BertSharples) January 9, 2019
Jeff's divorce statement sounds better than most people's marriage vows 😂
— Ahmed Nabi K. 🌱 (@ahmednabiK) January 9, 2019
...a dignified separation. Well-done to both of you!
— Praveen Paranjothi (@praveennjothi) January 9, 2019
LIFE OF THE WORLD’S RICHEST POWER COUPLE
Jeff Bezos is currently the richest man alive.
He and his soon-to-be-ex-wife MacKenzie, 48, have an estimated net worth of more than $US136 billion ($A189 billion) according to Forbes, mostly thanks to his holdings in Amazon.
The pair first met at D.E. Shaw & Co, an investment management firm in New York. Jeff was a vice president, and was the first person to interview MacKenzie — a fellow Princeton graduate — at the firm, where she went on to work as a research associate.
After she got the gig, they became office neighbours and friends. “All day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,” she told Voguein 2013. “How could you not fall in love with that laugh?”
Jeff, meanwhile, described her as “resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot”, saying he knew from the beginning that he wanted to marry her.
MacKenzie made the first move, according to a Business Insider profile of their marriage. The pair married in 1993, six months after she first asked him out to lunch.
A year later, they moved to Seattle and founded Amazon. MacKenzie said that, while she was not a “business person”, she felt the passion in his voice when he spoke about the idea. In the company’s early stages, she worked as an accountant.
Jeff would go on to become the world’s richest man, surpassing Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates three months ago. He’s also the first person in modern history to amass a fortune of more than $US100 billion ($136 billion).
He founded space company Blue Origin in 2000, and is funnelling $US1 billion a year of his own fortune into pulling it out of start-up mode and into production.
Meanwhile MacKenzie — armed with an English degree from Princeton — took a creative writing course with Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who called her “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes … really one of the best”.
She eventually became a novelist, winning an American Book Award for her 2005 debut novel The Testing of Luther Albright. For her second book, Traps, she chose not to share her work with her husband until it was finished.
She said it took her roughly a decade to write her first book, in part because she wanted to spend more time with her children.
Jeff was immensely supportive of his wife’s work. He has been known to take an entire day off to read her finished manuscripts in one, uninterrupted sitting.
“Jeff is my best reader,” she told Vogue in 2013.
The pair described themselves as a case of opposites attract, with MacKenzie telling Vogue his outgoing and sociable personality complimented her shyness.
“He likes to meet people. He’s a very social guy,” she said. “Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking. The brevity of conversations, the number of them — it’s not my sweet spot.”
Despite their astronomical wealth, the Bezos family are notoriously low-key, with the businessman famously washing the dishes each night, and his wife dropped him off at work in their Honda Accord, after they took their four kids to school, every day until 2013.
Danny Hillis, a close family friend, told Vogue that the Bezoses were “such a normal, close-knit family, it’s almost abnormal”.
Even though his work oversees Amazon and its more than half a million employees, Jeff never schedules early morning meetings so that he can spend time with his family, often making breakfast for his four children, The New York Postreported last year.
He also insists on getting eight hours of sleep every night and enjoys washing dishes after family dinners.
“I’m pretty convinced it’s the sexiest thing I do,” he once told an interviewer.
Over their 25 years together, the pair has undergone a major style transition. Photos of the Amazon CEO from the late 1990s showed him in “geek chic” pleated khaki pants, baggy button-up shirts and heavy suits.
Today, he’s known for his tight shirts and toned physique, and is often compared to actor Vin Diesel in the media.
“He looked a little pasty and rumpled after the ‘90s, and now he’s clearly working out every day,” Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, told Mail Online last April.
By August, the New York Times was describing Jeff as a “fully-fledged style icon”.
MacKenzie underwent a similar fashion transition. In the early years of their marriage, she was photographed in casual tracksuits and T-shirts, and sported a shorter, sportier haircut.
These days she rocks a more glamorous wardrobe, regularly rocking floor-length designer gowns on red carpets.
According to Jeff, she’s a real fashion lover, and he would often buy her surprise gifts. “Sometimes I call her and say, ‘What’s your such-and-such size?’ and she says, ‘Why?’ and I say, ‘None of your business!’” he told Vogue. “It delights her.”
Although the family has collectively amassed a huge fortune, the Bezos Family Foundation gave out only $US23,480,257 ($AU32,077,467) in contributions, mostly to schools and universities across the country, in 2016, according to the latest available federal tax filings.
The non-profit’s directors include parents Jacklyn and Miguel, their children — Jeff, Christina and Mark — in addition to MacKenzie, Mark’s wife, Lisa, and Christina’s husband, Stephen Poore.
Last September, Jeff took to Twitter to announce that he and MacKenzie were setting aside $US2 billion ($AU2.7 billion) to finance a new non-profit, the Day One Families Fund, which would help the homeless and set up a network of Montessori schools in impoverished communities.
WHAT WILL THE SEPARATION MEAN FOR MACKENZIE?
The details of the couple’s divorce settlements are unknown, but legal experts agree it’s unlikely to impact Amazon or turn bitter.
It’s unclear whether the couple had a prenuptial agreement, but according to USA Today, it’s unlikely.
“People get prenuptial agreements when they have assets to protect,” said Stuart Slotnick, chairman of the matrimonial department of law firm Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney in New York City. “In this case, they had no real assets vis à vis Amazon because when they got married Amazon did not exist.”
Whatever the agreement, he said it most likely would not impact Amazon’s operations — particularly considering the amicable nature of the split.
Wendy Crew, a family law specialist in Alabama, said the pair may have gotten a postnuptial agreement instead given “they had significant earning potential”.
But she agrees that the wording of their statement suggests future proceedings won’t be a nasty process. “They are successful in their lives,” Crew said, “so most likely they are going to be able to be successful co-parenting together.”
According to Reuters, the divorce should have no material impact on the company and its shares, with Refinitiv Eikon data showing MacKenzie does not hold any Amazon shares directly.
Liat Sadler, a San Francisco matrimonial lawyer, noted that spouses owe a fiduciary duty to one another.
“They have duties not to waste or devalue marital resources, and to keep the value of marital property as high as possible,” she told the outlet.
“I don’t think there is an issue of concern for shareholders as to what will happen to Amazon because of the divorce.”
Ms Sadler said the main options facing the couple regarding Amazon stock were for Jeff to buy out his wife or for MacKenzie to retain shares.
“If she trusts that he would manage Amazon well, either he should pay her for her share of the stock, or they could enter a more complicated agreement where she keeps stock and he keeps voting rights,” she said.
While the pair are separating, the wording of their announcement suggests there is still room for them to work together on future projects: “We also see wonderful futures ahead as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.”