What does a billionaire’s midlife crisis look like?
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos once had a sedate life. No longer. Harry de Quetteville reports on the reinvention of a Silicon Valley divorcé
Yo yo yo! Wazzup! Who’s that hipster in the smoking threads hanging out with Lizzo at the Superbowl Party? Is that Jeff Bezos? What do you mean, you don’t know who Lizzo is? Come on. Jeff’s on it. He knows. Lizzo is the hip, sassy rapper behind such delicious, infectious, seditious songs as Juice. And Jeff is her No 1 fan. How does he know? Because Jeff doesn’t leave things to chance. No sir. He’s got the tongue-incheek selfie to prove it. As he tweeted to his 1.2 million followers, riffing on one of the singer’s most popular lyrics: “I just took a DNA test, turns out I’m 100% @lizzo’s biggest fan.”
It’s fair to say the picture did not garner universal applause. Even in our malleable, style-is-substance age, it seems there remain look-away-now moments in any social reinvention. For many, hip new Jeff Bezos – founder of online retail giant Amazon – striking a pose with Lizzo was a through-the-fingers cringerama. The old rule is hearteningly constant: trying to be cool ain’t cool.
My, how Jeff is trying. In the 12 months since he posted news on social media of his split from MacKenzie, his wife of 26 years – rumoured to be the result of his relationship with Lauren Sanchez, to whom he is reportedly engaged – he has been outed as a “style icon”, exchanging his beige slacks for octopus-embossed Vilebrequin swimmers that David Cameron would be proud of. His once sedate home life in Seattle has been replaced by swinging with the cool cats in Hollywood in his expanded Beverly Hills mansion, and the powerbrokers in Washington, where he has a newly acquired pad.
It was in the latter that last month he hosted the after-party of the annual black-tie gathering of the Alfalfa Club, 200 of America’s wealthiest and most influential politicians and businessmen. Who cares if it cost $13 million (£10 million) to get the house refitted? Jeff can afford it – though his divorce trimmed his wealth to a mere $126 billion (MacKenzie has had to make do with about $40 billion, making her the third richest woman in the world). As for the $16,000 in parking tickets that his builders racked up while decorating g the place? Rules are for breaking. Rock and roll, man. Rock and roll.
Since his divorce, Jeff, after all, has been having the time of his life on mega-yachts in the Balearics, at the Wimbledon final and, in that shimmering embodiment of his new romance with mistress-turnedgirlfriend Sanchez, Venice.
“When you get divorced, you go out and drink with your mates,” says Karen n Krizanovich, the waspish American critic and agony aunt. “You got a billion n dollars, what do you do? You go out, but on a much, much bigger scale.”
It wasn’t always this way. In 2018 Bloomberg named Bezos the richest man in history, his wealth topping $150 billion. It was the culmination of 24 years of hard work since founding the so-called “everything store”, alongside MacKenzie, in 1994.
But just as he surpassed Croesus, he began an affair with the helicopter pilot ot wife of a Hollywood power broker, embarking on explorations of her eye-catching embonpoint aboard his private jet that helped end his marriage and for the first time made him a fixture of the gossip – not the business – pages. Rumours swirled further still after news last month that Bezos’s phone had reportedly been “hacked” via a WhatsApp message sent by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia’s mobile.
It was quite the departure for a man whose life, work and reputation until then had been defined by the three Fs: family, frugality and… fungus. Fungus, , because, as cliché would have it, the Star Trek nerd Bezos has proudly declared himself to be (he owns a replica of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s uniform, and once wangled his way into an appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation) meant he had hitherto o not been noted as a ladies’ man.
Rather, as he told Playboy back when n his business was a charming rival to bricks and mortar booksellers, rather than today’s titanic purveyor of goods and the infrastructure behind much of the internet itself: “I am not the kind of f person women fall in love with. I sort of grow on them, like a fungus.”
As for family and frugality, well, the
two values were stitched into his life even as his riches rocketed, manifest in his home in Seattle, where he and MacKenzie brought up their four children, and where he said he spent 80 per cent of his time. Here was the billionaire who professed to do the dishes every night, and who decorated the walls of his headquarters in the same Pacific Coast city with 14 “Leadership Principles”, of which No 10 read: “[Frugality] breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention!”
Yet here we are today, with a very different Jeff. A Bezos 2.0 for 2020. “Reinventing normal,” as he once described his company to shareholders, “and getting customers to say ‘Wow’.” Wow indeed, Jeff.
Once upon a time, through the six-page narrative pitches – no PowerPoint, please! – that his executives demand, it was only A Amazon’s products and services that were buffed and polished. Now, it is Bezos himself: the man who ate tins of buttermilk biscuits for breakfast when skinny and starting out is now bulked up and gym-honed, his biceps bulging in tight-fitting polo shirts; his receding hair shaved, pate shining, like the crewcut astronaut that some observers believe the man who founded the rocket company Blue Origin (motto: “Opening the promise of space to all”) still one day plans to be.
Now he and Sanchez, a former television anchor who was married to Hollywood super-agent Patrick Whitesell, are reported to be looking for a $100 million superhome together in Los Angeles.
Through Sanchez, a cast of new characters has entered Bezos’s once strictly controlled life. Perhaps the most colourful is her brother Michael, who appears to have started a feud over who might be the source of tip-offs to the National Enquirer, the gossip-sheet that broke the story of the billionaire’s affair and threatened to publish a “below-the-belt selfie” that he reportedly sent his paramour. It was in defamation lawsuit documents filed by Michael last week, accusing Bezos and his head of personal security, Gavin de Becker, of damaging his reputation, that news of his sister’s apparent engagement was broken. Bezos has responded that the lawsuit is a way for Michael to “put himself back on the front pages and extract money from them”.
These are rash times, and emotions are running high in Bezos land. Such impulsiveness is all too familiar to Telegraph columnist and therapist Linda Blair and is, she says, typical of the “sense of liberation, and freedom and elation that can come with divorce. Sometimes people act rashly… and emotions can easily overwhelm logic.”
She advises newly divorced men not to make big decisions quickly. “If you don’t wait, there’s a lot to regret. So I would say: stop and think.”
Bezos tends to agree. In a letter to his shareholders, he divided decisions into Type 1 and Type 2. The first are “consequential and irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before.” The second are “changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals.”
Has Jeff’s reinvention been a Type 1 or Type 2? Has he made it slowly, forever, or quickly, for now? And when it comes to his personal life, is he a “high-judgment individual”? The fate of a trillion-dollar company may rest on the outcome.