World’s richest Jeff Bezos agrees to a record-breaking $35bn divorce

• Posted on April 5, 2019
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

The world’s richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and his wife MacKenzie have agreed a record-breaking divorce settlement of at least $35bn (£27bn).

Ms Bezos keeps a 4% stake in the online retail giant, worth $35.6bn on its own.

Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in Seattle in 1994, a year after the couple married, and Ms Bezos was one of its first employees.

Both parties tweeted positive comments about the other in the wake of the announced settlement.

The two did not provide any further financial details about the settlement.

The Amazon shares alone will make Ms Bezos the world’s third-richest woman while Jeff will remain the world’s richest person, according to Forbes.

Jeff Bezos, 55, and MacKenzie, 48, a novelist, married in 1993 and have four children.

Ms Bezos’ tweet is her first and only one since joining the microblogging website this month. In it she stated that she was “grateful to have finished the process of dissolving my marriage to Jeff with support from each other”.

Mr Bezos tweeted: “I’m so grateful to all my friends and family for reaching out with encouragement and love… MacKenzie most of all.”

The tweet concluded with: “She is resourceful and brilliant and loving, and as our futures unroll, I know I’ll always be learning from her.”

Prior to the settlement, Mr Bezos held a 16.3% stake in Amazon. He will retain 75% of that holding but Ms Bezos has transferred all of her voting rights to her former husband.

She will also give up her interests in the Washington Post newspaper and Mr Bezos’ space travel firm Blue Origin.

Amazon is now vast online retail business. Last year, it generated sales of $232.8bn and it has helped Mr Bezos and his family amass a fortune of $131bn, according to Forbes magazine.

Ms Bezos is a successful novelist who has written two books, The Testing of Luther Albright and Traps. She was taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison at Princeton University, who once said of her pupil that she was “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes… really one of the best”.

Mr Bezos is reportedly in a relationship with former Fox TV host Lauren Sánchez.

After Mr Bezos and his wife announced in January that they would part, a US tabloid magazine published details, including private messages, of an extramarital affair with Ms Sánchez.

Mr Bezos has accused the publisher of the magazine, American Media Incorporated, of blackmail. The publisher denies the claim.

The divorce deal dwarfs a previous $3.8bn record set in 1999 by art dealer Alec Wildenstein and his wife Jocelyn, who became well-known for her cosmetic surgery.

-BBC