A successful divorce: Mackenzie Bezos and her $ 70 billion
'12.01.2019'
When 25’s longest-lasting marriage of Amazon’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who is the richest man in the world, will be dissolved, his ex-wife McKenzie will obviously become the richest woman and the fifth largest man in the world.
According to estimates by Bloomberg, now the value of Jeff Bezos’s property is 137 billion dollars. If you divide the amount in half, each spouse will have 68,5 billion worth of property left over. Thus, McKenzie Bezos would become the richest woman in the world, pushing from the first place the granddaughter of Eugene Schueller, founder of L'Oreal, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, whose property value is 45,7 billion dollars. It would also be the fifth on the list of the richest people on the planet; Now this position is occupied by the founder of Zara Amancia Ortega.
Everything, however, will depend on whether a marriage contract is concluded with Bezos, in which state the marriage will be dissolved and how the divorce proceedings will take place.
"If they are smart people, they will do it in private and quietly, and go on with their lives," Los Angeles-based lawyer Stacy Phillips of Blank Rome's law firm told The Wall Street Journal.
If the divorce takes place in Washington or the state of California, where they have real estate, the property will be divided in half.
Judging by the statements of the married couple, the divorce will be as quiet as possible with such a huge state. The couple announced the divorce in a joint post on Twitter, where Bezos confirmed that they remain friends. “If we knew that after 25 years of marriage we would divorce, we would still get married,” they wrote. "Although we may have different surnames in the future, we will remain family and loyal friends." The cost of Amazon is very closely related to Jeff Bezos; by agreement, the couple can divide the property in another way. In any event, McKenzie is likely to become Amazon's second-largest shareholder.
“I don’t imagine there will be any other agreement,” famous divorce attorney Ira Garr, who represented media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Ivanka Trump during divorce proceedings, told Business Insider.
Earlier this week, Amazon went around costing Microsoft and came out on top in the world. The question arises as to how Bezos should inform the board of an enterprise about the course of a divorce and how well investors should be aware of. The answer will depend on the extent to which the topic generally concerns the enterprise.
“Who will the dog stay with? This is obviously irrelevant, Charles Whitehead, professor of law at Cornell University, told The Wall Street Journal. - How will the shares be distributed? This is more important. "
Mackenzie Bezos (nee Tuttle) grew up in San Francisco, where her father worked as a financial consultant. In 1992, she graduated from Princeton University with a degree in English (Jeff Bezos graduated from the same university six years earlier). After graduating from university, she left to look for a job in New York and met her future husband at a working interview at the DE Shaw venture capital fund.
Mackenzie was hired, by the will of fate, her office was located next to the office of Jeff Bezos. She later said that she was attracted by Bezos’s special laugh.
“My office was next to his, and I often heard this weird laugh,” Bezos told Vogue magazine in 2013. - How could you not fall in love with him?
She took matters into her own hands and invited Jeff to dinner. Three months later, they were engaged, and three months later, in 1993, they got married. McKenzie was 23 then, and Jeff was 29. Soon after the wedding, Jeff had an idea that grew up at Amazon.
"I told my wife McKenzie that I want to quit my job and do something crazy, which probably won't work out, because most startups don't work out, and I'm not sure what will happen next," said Jeff Bezos in a speech given at his alma mater, Princeton, in 2010.
McKenzie agreed with the plan, and in 1994, the couple moved to Seattle, where Jeff opened an online bookstore in their garage. While they were moving, she was driving, so that Jeff could write on the laptop a new business plan. McKenzie Bezos was also one of Amazon's first key employees. In addition, she tried herself as a writer. From her pen came out two novels, the American Book Award in the year 2006 was awarded the book "The Test of Luther Albright" and in 2013-m - "The Trap".
How much does Jeff Bezos have?
In 2017, Amazon’s large shareholder Jeff Bezos bypassed Bill Gates’s property value and became the world's richest man.
More than 90% of its assets are virtual, as we are talking about Amazon shares: it owns 16,3% of the company, whose value is estimated at 132 billion dollars. To finance his Blue Origin space program, he annually sells Amazon shares to a billion dollars.
As you know, directly from McKenzie Bezos, there are no Amazon shares.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos acquired The Washington Post for 250 million dollars and owns shares in several events through investment funds.
He was one of Google’s first business angels, investing a million dollars in a 1998 firm. In Uber, he invested 2011 millions in 37, and in the same year 112 invested millions in Airbnb.
Bezos has properties in several US states. The main home of the couple is in Medina, Washington, the cost of the house near the lake is 25 million dollars. Their neighbor is Bill Gates. In Washington, they have a house of 2500 square meters, which cost 23 a million dollars. Their neighbors are Barack and Michelle Obama and Ivanka Trump.
In Manhattan in New York, Jeff Bezos has three interconnected apartments with a minimum value of 17 million dollars.
In California's Beverly Hills, he has an 2,03 acre (0,44 hectare) land worth about 14 million dollars.
