Celia Walden
Bezos will miss his wife more than any loss of his billions of dollars
‘IF WE had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all over again.” It’s not often a celebrity divorce statement rings true, but when Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie – a couple who had seemingly done everything right – announced their divorce on Twitter yesterday, this one line stood out as genuine.
The rest of the statement – the “wonderful futures”, “loving exploration” sense that both parties have been “incredibly lucky”, and will remain “cherished friends” – is all stock “prettifying” divorce statement lingo in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and doesn’t for a second rule out a vicious and financially crippling extended battle to come.
But although Bezos’s worth – an estimated $137bn (€118bn) – makes him the richest person in history, and theirs is already being hyped “the world’s richest divorce”, I can’t imagine there will be any of the drama that took place with similar mega-billion dollar splits: Alec and Jocelyn Wildenstein’s divorce in 1999 (estimated at $5.7bn, inflation adjusted) and Rupert Murdoch’s divorce that same year from wife Anna (estimated at $2.6bn, inflation adjusted).
To adapt an Ivana Trump quote, neither Bezos seems “mad” or harbouring a desire to “get even”. These two have never liked drama.
“Shy and bookish” novelist MacKenzie fell in love with Bezos when he interviewed her for a position at a New York hedge fund. Actually she fell in love with his laugh first, she says, and was only 23 to his 29 when she married him six months later.
Although MacKenzie has described her husband as “more sociable” than her, neither is a fixture on the party scene, unlike tech magnates such as Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel.
Instead, they seem to have preferred to live such a hyper-normal life – with family breakfasts and MacKenzie dropping their four children off at school in her Honda, before driving Bezos to work
every morning – that one family friend told ‘Vogue’, “it’s almost abnormal”.
They were spotted loved up on Rome getaways. She would leave vitamins in her husband’s socks when he travelled, to make sure he took them. He’d refuse to take morning meetings that might eat into family time, and clear his schedule for whole days to read his wife’s manuscripts, leaving meticulous notes in the margins.
When Amazon started its own publishing imprint and MacKenzie was independent enough to refuse to become one of her husband’s authors, Bezos lovingly told one reporter: “We are calling her the fish that got away.”
All this sounds like a “till death”-style marriage. Yet there’s a hint in the 2013 ‘Vogue’ profile that MacKenzie was concerned about the impact of their enormous wealth on the children. And who wouldn’t be?
However, one wonders whether she felt the pressures of such vast fortune on her marriage, too. And the attempt to improve upon something that was already so good: even Bezos’s physique went from technerd wimp to muscle man as his empire grew.
Ordinary marriages are hard to make work, but this was an ordinary marriage turned extraordinary.
Once the money men dividing up Bezos’s billions are done (any wealth made during their marriage could be split equally between the two), the Amazon founder may no longer be the world’s richest man. Yet I doubt he’ll miss that as much as the woman who helped him build his fortune.
Laura Wasser, the top Hollywood divorce lawyer, once described divorce to me as “the great equaliser”.
“In the end everybody has the same anxiety, sadness and anger when a marriage ends. Whether it’s ‘who is going to walk the red carpet with me at the Oscars?’ or ‘who is going to go to the office Christmas party with me and Xerox their face next to mine?’, the fears are the same.”
Would it comfort Bezos to know that even if his wife did get half his fortune, he would still rank as one of the world’s richest people?
At $68bn, he would be fourth on Bloomberg’s rich list and no doubt speedily claw his way back up again, if Amazon’s profits continue in their current vein. (© Daily Telegraph London)
Once the money men dividing up Bezo’s billions are done, the Amazon founder may no longer be the world’s richest man