Jeff Bezos and wife in amicable split but get ready for mega divorce

The world’s richest couple are to divorce amicably after 25 years of marriage; look out for the most expensive settlement in history.

Jeff Bezos and wife MacKenzie Bezos arrive at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills. Picture: AP.

The world’s richest couple are to divorce after 25 years of marriage that produced four children and one scrappy internet book vendor that grew into the most valuable company on the planet.

Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie announced their decision today in a joint statement put out on the Amazon chief executive’s Twitter account.

“After a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends,” the couple said.

“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.”

It was a warm message with the couple stating that they “remain a family and we remain cherished friends”.

pic.twitter.com/Gb10BDb0x0

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 9, 2019

That will not dampen speculation, however, that this could become the most expensive divorce in history. Mr Bezos, 54, has paid numerous tributes to his 48-year-old wife’s vital role in the birth and rise of Amazon, which edged past Microsoft to become the world’s most valuable company for the first time on Monday.

“When you have loving and supportive people in your life, like MacKenzie, my parents, my grandfather, my grandmother, you end up being able to take risks,” he said in April.

As far his personal finances go he may just have taken the biggest risk of his career.

Mr Bezos usurped Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates as the wealthiest person alive last year, with a fortune now estimated at $137 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

How much of that ends up with MacKenzie is likely to depend on her and her legal team’s assessment of her husband’s importance to Amazon’s future prospects and whether they had a prenuptial agreement, lawyers said.

Washington state, where the Bezos family — and Amazon — are based, is a community property state, which means that any wealth made during their marriage could be split equally between them.

Because their marriage predates the founding of Amazon, MacKenzie could theoretically argue that she is entitled to half of Mr Bezos’s wealth.

Yet for him to fund a settlement anywhere near that big he would have to sell or pledge a large proportion of the nearly 80 million shares he owns in Amazon, which gives him an almost 16 per cent stake in the company, according to regulatory filings.

That could hurt Amazon’s share price and therefore the value of the shares that she gets, as well as damaging the wider family’s fortune, according to Jeffrey Fisher, a divorce lawyer in West Palm Beach, Florida, who has handled several billionaire divorces. “There would be an argument by the attorneys that the Amazon stake is not worth as much without Bezos in control, so that would affect any settlement,” he told CNBC.

The couple met in 1993 when Mr Bezos interviewed her for a job at the New York-based hedge fund DE Shaw where he was a vice-president. She was an aspiring research associate who had been an assistant to the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison while studying at Princeton.

“I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot but I had the good fortune of having seen her resumé before I met her, ” Mr Bezos told Vogue in 2013.

MacKenzie got the job and they were married within six months of their first date.

He has recalled how at the time he was “this stable guy” with a reliable finance career. But then he told her that he dreamed of uprooting to the west coast “to start this internet bookstore”.

“Like everybody I explained this to, her first question was, ‘What’s the internet?’ Because nobody knew,” Mr Bezos once said. “But even before she could say ‘What’s the internet?’ she said, ‘Great — let’s go!’”

Shortly after their marriage, in the summer of 1994 they flew to Fort Worth in Texas where his parents gave them a car and a significant chunk of their savings as seed funding. They set out on an epic road trip bound for the Pacific Northwest while drafting a business plan and calling potential investors.

They rented a small house in suburban Seattle and Amazon took shape in their garage. For the first year she did the accounts. Within four years he was a paper billionaire and by December 1999 he was on the cover of Time as the magazine’s person of the year.

As his business career went from strength to strength, eventually embracing space exploration, a Hollywood studio and newspaper proprietorship, she reverted to her earlier passion for literature and became a novelist.

Last year the couple announced a joint philanthropic venture, committing $2 billion to fund charities that help homeless families and to create a network of nurseries in low-income communities.

In their statement the couple said that they looked forward to continuing to work together as “parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures”.

The Times