KER-CHING, BUT NO BLING!
The world’s richest man leads a humble life, but what’s he going to do with all his dosh?
THEY go jogging together, have breakfast with their kids every day and after supper each night he rolls up his sleeves and washes the dishes. In other words, they sound as regular and wholesome as apple pie – except for one rather glaring difference.
The dad of this household earns on average about $230 000 (R2,7 million) a minute – more than four times the annual salary of the average American.
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of ecommerce giant Amazon, was recently named the richest man in the world. He’s at the top of the latest Forbes World’s Billionaires list and has been declared the world’s first “centibillionaire” – meaning his wealth has surpassed the $100 billion (R1,2 trillion) mark.
In early March, Jeff (54) was worth a staggering $112 billion (about R1,3 trillion) – way ahead of Bill Gates, who came in second at $91,6 billion ( just over R1 trillion). By the middle of the month Jeff’s “real-time net worth” had risen to $131 billion (about R1,5 trillion), according to Forbes, and his e-trading empire could become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.
Jeff believes he couldn’t have done any of it without his wife, MacKenzie, the dynamic brunette he married 24 years ago. And despite their vast wealth and staggering success, they’ve continued to lead a fairly normal life since starting their little business in a garage in Seattle, Washington, all those years ago.
MACKENZIE (47) has been with Jeff on his Amazon journey from the word go. They met at a New York asset management company where MacKenzie, who like Jeff is a graduate of prestigious Princeton
university, applied for a job as a researcher.
As vice-president, Jeff was the first person to interview her. “I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot but I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her,” he once joked.
She got the job and began working in the office next to his. “All day long I listened to that fabulous laugh – how could you not fall in love with that laugh?” MacKenzie has said.
She made the first move, inviting him to dinner, and nine months later they were married. That year – 1993 – was also when he first told her about his vision of making it big in e-commerce.
A year after their wedding they moved to Seattle, where Jeff started Amazon in the garage of their one-bedroom rented home.
They continued to live there until 1999 – by which time he was already a billionaire. Today they own at least five properties: in Washington State, California’s Beverly Hills, Texas, New York and Washington DC.
MacKenzie was one of Amazon’s first employees and her duties included accounting.
They’re such a normal family that it’s “almost abnormal”, a friend of Jeff has said. But what does a “normal” life look like for this couple who make such headspinning amounts of money?
Jeff makes sure he gets eight hours’ sleep a night and believes in waking up naturally – no alarm clocks for the Amazon king.
The Bezos family start their day with a healthy breakfast, which is why Jeff never schedules early meetings.
He and MacKenzie are often snapped walking or jogging. Recent pictures of Jeff showing off sculpted arms in a golf T-shirt drew comparisons to Vin Diesel and The Rock. “Swole Jeff Bezos” quickly became an internet meme, and pictures of a decidedly nerdier Jeff from 1998, captioned “I sell books”, juxtaposed with the current buff Bezos captioned “I sell whatever the f***k I want” did the rounds on social media.
For years MacKenzie drove the couple’s four kids to school in a Honda station wagon, then dropped Jeff off at work – despite them being able to afford an army of chauffeurs and childminders.
They mostly keep their children – three sons, of whom the eldest is 17, and a younger adopted daughter from China – out of the spotlight.
But MacKenzie has revealed their education includes diverse experiences, from “off-season travel, kitchen-science experiments and Mandarin lessons to clubs and sports with neighbourhood kids”.
The past few years she’s explored fiction writing. English was one of her majors at Princeton and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison, one of her lecturers, has said MacKenzie was “one of the best students I’ve ever had”. MacKenzie believes the fact she and Jeff have such different personalities means they complement each other. “He likes to meet people. He’s a very social guy while cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking.” Jeff loves to buy his wife clothes on impulse. “Sometimes I call her and say, ‘ What’s your such-and-such size?’ And she says, ‘Why?’ And I say, ‘None of your business!’ It delights her,” Jeff has said. And in an interview a few years ago he revealed he does the dishes every night. “I’m pretty convinced it’s the sexiest thing I do.”
THERE’S been much speculation about what a magnate as frugal as Jeff plans to do with all his dosh.
Bezos-watchers believe he’s aiming for space. His aerospace company, Blue Origin, is one of his passions and he’s gravely concerned about the damage we’re doing to our planet.
Blue Origin develops reusable rockets that will eventually transport people into outer space, he says.
But it’s an expensive business, even for Jeff, who’s a devout Trekkie and appeared in a cameo in the movie Star Trek Beyond.
“The cost of access to space is very high,” he said when he attended the recent Buzz Aldrin Space Exploration Awards.
He’s investing a significant share of his Amazon millions in his space projects, he added, “so we can explore the solar system”.
Should be able to do quite a bit of exploring then!