Bezos divorce will split up most assets ever

Wife helped Amazon CEO amass $137B

SEATTLE • Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Mackenzie are divorcing, ending a 25-year marriage that played a role in the creation of an e-commerce company that made Bezos the world’s wealthiest person.

The decision to divorce comes after a trial separation, according to a statement posted Wednesday on Bezos’ Twitter account. Both Bezoses signed the announcement, which ended with a vow to remain “cherished friends.”

Left unanswered was one of the biggest sticking points in any divorce: How the assets amassed during the marriage will be divided.

And there has never been more money than in this case.

Bezos’ fortune hovers around US$137 billion, based on estimates by both Forbes and Bloomberg. Virtually all of that is tied up in the nearly 79 million shares of Amazon stock (currently worth about $130 billion) that Bezos owns in the Seattle company, translating into a 16 per cent stake. Bezos, 54, also owns rocket ship maker Blue Origin and The Washington Post, which he bought for $250 million in 2013.

Because the pair were married before Amazon was founded, it’s likely that Mackenzie holds a large claim to that fortune. The Bezoses also have four children.

“The property acquired during the marriage is common property,” said Jennifer Payseno, a family lawyer at the firm Mckinley Irvin in Seattle. That includes stock ownership, although Amazon has not filed any regulatory documents to suggest Bezos’ stake in the company has changed.

The amicable tenor of the Bezos’ divorce announcement makes it highly likely that the couple already has reached an agreement on how to divide their assets, Payseno said.

Amazon’s origins trace back to a road trip that the Bezoses took together not long after they met in New York while working at hedge fund D.E. Shaw. They got married just six months after they began dating, according to Bezos.

Not long after that, Jeff Bezos quit his job at Shaw and started an online bookstore. While his wife did the cross-country driving, Bezos wrote a business plan on the way to Seattle — chosen for its abundance of tech talent. By July 1995, Amazon was operating out of a garage, with Mackenzie Bezos lending a hand, according to a review she posted on Amazon in 2013 panning The Everything Store, a book about Bezos and the company written by Brad Stone.

“I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others represented in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centres, and the door-desk filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history,” she recalled.