Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, announced Thursday a divorce settlement that will leave him with 75 percent of their Amazon stock and voting power over all of the Amazon voting shares the couple once owned together.
The announcement from the Bezoses — coming in a tweet from MacKenzie that was retweeted by Jeff — settled a closely watched matter of corporate governance affecting one of the world’s richest companies, with a market capitalization of $ 890 billion, and the world’s wealthiest person.
The record divorce settlement, which also awards Jeff Bezos all of the couple’s joint holdings in The Washington Post and a space-flight company, Blue Origin, is likely to remove uncertainty over the extent of his continued control over Amazon — a company he founded in 1994 and for which he remains chief executive and its largest shareholder. Their marriage lasted 25 years and produced four children.
MacKenzie Bezos, 48, will be awarded about 4 percent of the company, a stake which is worth roughly $ 36 billion based on Amazon’s market value Thursday. She becomes one of the wealthiest women in the world, after such heiresses as the women who own giant stakes in L’Oreal and Wal-Mart.
Bezos, 55, will retain the remaining 12 percent of the company. He will, however, have sole voting power over the shares the two once jointly controlled, which together amount to 16 percent of Amazon’s total shares. Jeff Bezos is worth at least $ 107 billion, based on his Amazon holdings alone. Forbes estimated his worth earlier this year at $ 131 billion, prior to the divorce settlement. The world’s second-richest person was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, a neighbor of the Bezoses, with about $ 96.5 billion, according to Forbes.
The divorce should be settled in roughly 90 days, according to an Amazon regulatory filing Thursday.
Investors shrugged off the news Thursday afternoon, with the stock, which was down slightly for the day, showing little obvious change after the tweets, suggesting that investors expected a divorce settlement that left Bezos firmly in control. It wasn’t immediately clear how the couple may divvy up their various holdings in companies such as Airbnb and Uber. His Bezos Expeditions venture firm has invested in tech firms, including trucking startup Convoy and human resources software firm Workday, as well as Business Insider.
A spokesman for Jeff Bezos didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. MacKenzie Bezos’s literary agent declined to make her available for comment.
MacKenzie Bezos, author of the 2013 novel “Traps,” was the first to speak on the divorce settlement on Thursday, announcing the terms in a tweet and adding on a personal note, “Grateful to have finished the process of dissolving my marriage with Jeff with support from each other and everyone who reached out to us in kindness, and looking forward to the next phase as co-parents and friends… Excited about my own plans. Grateful for the past as I look forward to what comes next.”
Jeff Bezos followed moments later with his own tweet echoing hers and adding of his ex-wife, “She has been an extraordinary partner, ally, and mother. She is resourceful and brilliant and loving, and as our futures unroll, I know I’ll always be learning from her.”
The couple didn’t disclose custody terms of their children on Thursday.
The public exchange of affectionate respect between the couple came after months of awkward revelations about Jeff Bezos’s relationship with a former news anchor, Lauren Sanchez. Their intimate phone-text exchanges and photographs were published by the National Enquirer in January. Bezos later accused the tabloid of attempting to blackmail him by threatening to publish more intimate photos unless he publicly declared the Enquirer’s reporting was not politically motivated.
He responded in the blog post by including copies of Enquirer emails detailing the alleged threat, in the process revealing graphic descriptions of what the images showed. The National Enquirer has said it was engaged in “good faith negotiations to resolve all matters with him.”
MacKenzie Bezos worked in Amazon’s early days as an accountant and helped to negotiate contracts. The two of them met as employees of hedge fund D.E. Shaw in New York City and were married in 1993, about a year before Jeff Bezos founded Amazon as an online bookseller in Seattle, where they settled.
Thursday was the second time the couple used Twitter to announce information about their marriage. “As our family and close friends know, after a period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends,” they announced in January.
The tweet, which appeared under the signature of “Jeff & MacKenzie” said nothing about their assets, fueling speculation over how the couple would divide up more than $ 130 billion of assets accumulated during their marriage.
Peter Walzer, president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, said shortly after the announcement that dividing assets can prove complex when the bulk of a couple’s wealth is tied up in a single company.
“These do get very complicated,” said Walzer.
He said Thursday that the deal announced on Twitter left key details unanswered, including whether there was a pre-nuptial agreement or other factor that kept MacKenzie Bezos from getting half of all assets. Divorce law in Washington — the couple lives in a Seattle suburb — treats property accumulated during a marriage as shared equally between the two spouses, unless there are pre-nuptial or post-nuptial agreements that make different arrangements contractually.
“Any deal is a good deal if they agree to it,” Walzer said. “She’s one of the wealthiest people in the world, but … why wouldn’t she get half of everything?”
Thursday’s announcement also resolved questions about the future of The Washington Post, which Bezos personally bought for $ 250 million in 2013, and Blue Origin.
Bezos’s ownership of the Post has drawn the famously private technology titan into public view. President Trump has regularly criticized Amazon, The Washington Post and Bezos on Twitter, sometimes intentionally misspelling his name.
After news broke of the looming divorce — and during a period of questions about the future of his various holdings — Trump tweeted, “So sorry to hear the news about Jeff Bozo being taken down by a competitor whose reporting, I understand, is far more accurate than the reporting in his lobbyist newspaper, the Amazon Washington Post. Hopefully the paper will soon be placed in better & more responsible hands!”
Blue Origin, based south of Seattle, has long been one of Bezos’s main passions. As a child, he was a Star Trek devotee, and he founded Blue Origin in 2000 with the hopes of eventually having “millions of people living and working in space.”
He has said that attempting to lower the cost of access to space is “the most important work I’m doing.” He’s referred to Amazon being a winning “lottery ticket” that has allowed him to indulge his passion for space by starting Blue Origin, and has pledged to spend $ 1 billion a year of his own money on the venture.
Christian Davenport and Renae Merle contributed to this story.
