Bezos' ex-wife will be the richest woman in the world

female specificity 

The measured announcement of the divorce, after 25 years of marriage, between Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos will make Mrs. Bezos, a writer by trade, the richest woman in the world. In fact, under the law of the state of Washington where the Bezos reside, all of a couple's assets created after marriage belong equally to both spouses. The immense fortune of the Bezos couple occurred right after the wedding and Mrs. MacKenzie had a very active role in the initial stages of Amazon, which were the most difficult for the Seattle mastodon, today the most capitalized company on the planet. 

Many are wondering what the details of the asset division agreement will be and if Amazon's share structure will change (currently Jeff Bezos has 16%), what MacKenzie will do with the mountain of money that will come to her anyway. Many bet on charity, an already established and important activity, others think that writing will absorb the lady's time, in addition to her 4 children and, indeed, charity. 

There is already a precedent, that of Steve Jobs widow Laurene Powell Jobs net worth $20,6 billion. After the disappearance of the visionary and brilliant co-founder of Apple, with the Laurene Powell Jobs Trust (which controls 8% of Disney) Mrs. Jobs has been deeply committed to progressive causes, also purchasing a series of historical publications, including the glorious "The Atlantic" in trouble. At the New York Times she convinced herself that the free and independent media are a propylaea of ​​democracy in America, as Tocqueville thought, and that this state of affairs is disappearing and whoever can must do something. Laurene's liberal and humanitarian ideals are not a recent discovery. Isaacson, Jobs' biographer, recounts that when Murdoch visited Jobs at his Palo Alto home, Steve had to hide all the knives for fear that Laurene would use any of them against the Fox News editor. 

The fact that MacKenzie is one writer, also talented and that he has not exploited his position to promote himself is a good thing and a good omen for those who honestly want to base their profession on this often thankless activity which hardly repays the commitment, efforts and sacrifices it requires. Actually there was another woman who, through a very different path, came to conquer the top of the wealthiest people compiled by Forbes. It is JK Rowling who was at one point the richest person in the UK and she owed this distinction solely to her talent. 

Let's try to better understand who MacKenzie Bezos is with the help of a report published in the "New York Times" translated and adapted by Lucrezia Pei. Enjoy the reading!! 

Far from the spotlight 

In her XNUMX-year marriage to Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos has been a loyal ambassador for Amazon, a company that made her and her husband the richest couple in the world.  

She was integral to her origins: She was the one driving from New York to Seattle in 1994, with Bezos in the passenger seat working on the business plan of the budding company. She was Amazon's first accountant and helped transform it from a small digital bookstore to the e-commerce giant it is today, the second company in American history to be valued at more than a trillion dollars.  

Ms. Bezos, forty-eight, is a writer. But it was Amazon that almost entirely defined her public image of her. The announcement this week of her divorce from her husband may soon change that.  

A statement signed by Jeff & MacKenzie, originally posted on Bezos' Twitter account, reads: "After a period of loving exploration and separation, we have decided to divorce and continue to share our lives as friends."  

The couple, who have four children, wrote that they see "a wonderful tomorrow on the horizon as parents, friends, partners in initiatives and projects, and as individuals in search of ventures and adventures."  

In recent decades, as Amazon grew, Ms. Bezos has appeared with her husband at some high-profile events, including parties held by Vanity Fair at the Oscars and Golden Globes; in 2012 she hosted the Met Gala (Amazon also funded the event). But Ms. Bezos has mostly preserved her privacy, preferring to focus on writing and her children. You could not be reached for comment on this article.  

She made rare forays into the limelight to promote her books and defend her husband's company. In 2013, she posted a scathing one-star review on Amazon on Sell ​​everything. Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon, a book on Amazon written by Brad Stone, to say it was “riddled with inaccuracies” and “full of storytelling techniques that push the boundaries of non-fiction” (Stone is a veteran technology journalist. Michiko Kakutani, in her review of the book made for the New York Times, said he “told this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and doing a lot of good information).  

Little is known about Ms. Bezos, a private woman who could be awarded one of the most substantial divorce settlements to date.   

Tafter the library 

MacKenzie Tuttle, an aspiring writer, met her husband at DE Shaw & Co., a New York hedge fund where Bezos, with a developer background, had risen to senior vice president. 

He told Spindrift that she had accepted the position of administrative assistant to support herself while she worked on her novels, but soon found herself enamored with the laughter of the man who worked in the office next door. As Bezos also said in a 2013 interview with Charlie Rose: “It was love at first listening”.  

After three months of dating, the two were engaged; they wed shortly after at a resort in West Palm Beach, Florida. Bezos was thirty; Mrs. Bezos, twenty-three.  

She has often described herself as an introverted book lover, especially compared to Bezos, the swaggering and wildly outgoing businessman whose greatest desire, romantically speaking, as she told Wired in 1999, six years after getting married, it was to meet someone “resourceful”. (That kind of attraction appears to be mutual. In 2017, Bezos told a Summit panel that one of his wife's maxims is, "I'd rather have a kid with nine fingers than one with no resources.")  

Ms. Bezos's literary ambitions began in childhood. According to interviews and her Amazon author bio (where she coyly reports living in Seattle with her husband and four children), she began writing seriously at the age of six, when she finished a little book of 142 titled pages The bookworm. It was later destroyed in a flood; Ms. Bezos said she now meticulously keeps her work.  

At Princeton, she studied creative writing with Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, who hired her as a research assistant on her 1992 novel, Jazz, and introduced her to his all-powerful literary agent, Amanda Urban.  

Su Spindrift, Morrison hailed Ms. Bezos as a rare talent, calling her "one of the best students I've ever had in my writing classes." In 2005 he wrote Ms. Bezos an enthusiastic blurb for her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, calling it "a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and fills the heart."  

After graduated from Princeton in 1992, six years after Bezos graduated from the same university, Ms. Bezos took the job that would introduce her to the future e-commerce giant. The couple married in 1993 and moved to Seattle in 1994, the same year Amazon was incorporated.  

Soon, Mrs. Bezos' identity was sucked into her husband's company, even as she tried to make her mark on the publishing industry he worked tirelessly to revolutionize it.  

Ambassador for Amazon 

Bezos knew from the start that he wanted to disrupt traditional retailing by using the internet. He quickly built Amazon into a successful digital bookstore, then began diversifying, selling music (when it was still viable), videos, drugs, and other consumer goods.  

His, as he told Chip Bayers who published his profile in 1999 on Wired, was a foreboding vision.  

Bezos predicted that in 2020, “the bulk of in-store merchandise — food, paper products, cleaning supplies, and the like — will be orderable via the Internet. Some physical stores will survive, but they will have to offer at least one of two things: spectacularity or immediate convenience”.

MacKenzie Bezos, who initially lived with her husband in a rented house in a suburb of East Seattle, was at first heavily involved in the company: in addition to working as an accountant, she helped think of a name for the company and even mailed first orders through ups, second Sell ​​everything. 

“Clearly, he had a lot of say in those early years,” Stone said in an interview conducted for this article.  

In 1991, they moved into a ten million dollar mansion in Medina, Washington, and Mrs. Bezos became pregnant with their first child. As he rapidly amassed a fortune, the Bezos family still made every effort to preserve some semblance of normalcy. Ms. Bezos often drove her four children to school in her Honda, and then left Bezos at the office, Stone writes.  

“The company grew rich, and Mrs. Bezos drifted away, devoting herself to her family and literary ambitions. Her business wasn't her passion, and when Amazon took off, she wasn't as involved in routine business anymore,” Stone said.

Literary activity 

He spent a decade working on his first novel, often getting up early to write, and signed a contract with the literary agent of his mentor, Ms. Urban of icm Partners, who also represents Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro . 

The Testing of Luther Albright, published by Harper Collins in 2005 and widely received by critics, tells the story of an engineer whose professional and private life begins to go wrong in the XNUMXs.  

In a review published in the New York Times, Kate Bolick called the novel "subtly engaging". The Los Angeles Times declared it one of the best books of the year, and Publishers Weekly lauded Ms. Bezos's "subtle imagination and surprising flair for naturalism." 

In 2013, Ms. Bezos released her second novel, The imperfect time of goodbyes, which follows the journey of a woman, Jessica Lessing, a lonely movie star, who emerges from her hiding place to face her father, a con man who has been selling her to the paparazzi for years. Jessica drives to Las Vegas to meet him, where she runs into three other women: an unwed mother, a dog shelter owner, and an ex-military soldier-turned-bodyguard, all of whom become her allies. 

“I would say that the major theme of the book is the idea that the things we worry most about in our lives, the things that make us feel trapped, the mistakes we've made, the strokes of bad luck we've had, the the incidents we've been through, the paradoxes – in the end, often those are the things we'll look back on and be most grateful for,” Ms. Bezos said of her novel in an interview with Charlie Rose. “They lead us where we need to go.”  

Throughout their marriage, Bezos was an avid fan of Ms. Bezos' writing, and had a habit of canceling his own engagements to read drafts of her novels, Ms. Bezos told Spindrift. In the thanks de The imperfect time of goodbyes, called him “my most faithful reader”.  

But Ms. Bezos's literary career may have been complicated, in some respects, by her famous husband, who has done more than anyone else in recent history to transform, and sometimes destabilize, the book business. Many independent bookstores, publishing houses and agents blame Amazon for building a monopoly that has put independent bookstores out of business and poses a major threat to once-thriving chains like Barnes & Noble. 

Although Amazon has sensationally introduced its own imprints, Ms. Bezos has nevertheless chosen traditional publishers for her books: Harper Collins and Knopf (when asked by an interviewer why Ms. Bezos would not publish her books through Amazon fiction imprints, Bezos jokingly called his wife "the fish that got away from him").  

Sales of her books have been modest: The novels have sold a few thousand copies, according to npd BookScan. which tracks 85% of print sales. Some independent bookstores have refused to order Ms. Bezos' novels, according to a publishing executive who spoke to us on condition of anonymity. Urban, Ms. Bezos' literary agent, has opted not to comment for this article. 

A divorce multibillionaire 

The Bezoses were the richest couple in the world; their divorce comes upon a virtually unprecedented level of wealth. There have been billionaire divorces, such as that of Steve and Elaine Wynn, who co-owned casinos, and no doubt tech entrepreneurs have been going back and forth to divorce courts — especially Larry Ellison, cofounder of Oracle who is been married and divorced four times. 

But there has never been a divorce between a couple with an estimated net worth of 137 billion, as was the case with Mr and Mrs Bezos. 

Not much is known about the couple's financial arrangements. Divorces are governed by state law, and the Bezoses' primary residence and business is in Washington state, where there is community property and any income received or wealth accumulated during the duration of the marriage is divided equally between the newlyweds.  

But some lawyers believe it is unlikely that Mr. and Mrs. Bezos will adhere to the guidelines in a predictable manner. If they divided their wealth equally, Bezos could end up with his 16,1% Amazon stake halved. 

"I guess they haven't argued at all about how much wealth each of them will get," said William Zabel, a founding partner of the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, which has handled many famous divorces but hasn't worked with the Bezos. Probably, he said, "the question will be who is in control."  

Zabel, who represented Wendi Murdoch and Hane Welch during their splits, said he believes the Bezoses will almost certainly negotiate a way to split the value of Amazon's shares while still giving Bezos the decision-making power he might need. The duration of validity of such an agreement would be part of the negotiations.  

Ms. Bezos has kept a low profile in recent weeks, and hasn't been photographed since the divorce was announced (Bezos, by contrast, has continued to appear publicly and was photographed this month at the Golden Globes afterparty with Lauren Sanchez , a former TV presenter he is dating).  

A future in philanthropy? 

Certainly Ms. Bezos will have to answer some unavoidable questions, for example about her plans for philanthropy projects. In the past, the Bezos' donations to charities have been modest. In 2011, they donated $15 million to their university for the creation of a center for the study of the brain. The following year, they donated $2,5 million in support of the same-sex marriage referendum in Washington. 

In 2017, Bezos asked his Twitter followers for advice on the best way to give to charity, and in September he and Ms. Bezos announced the creation of a two billion dollar fund to help homeless families and start of a network of Montessori kindergartens.  

But Ms. Bezos could be making her own way in the world of philanthropy, like Laurene Powell Jobs, who started her own foundation, the Emerson Collective. 

And if Ms. Bezos continues to write and publish, perhaps she could find a more open audience among independent bookstores. At the very least, some editorial executives, who they declined to be officially named, spoke with some malice that should Ms. Bezos decide to write a memoir, it has the potential to be a huge success. 

One also wonders how Mrs. Bezos will react to the personal and political storm that hit her husband after The National Enquirer, a pro-Trump newspaper - which in turn swore it to Jeff Bezos via the Washington Post -, he said he had photos and rather explicit exchanges of messages between the Amazon boss and Sanchez. The story that brought him into direct controversy with the President of the United States and which is the public case of the moment undoubtedly also affects Mrs. Bezos in many aspects, including personal ones. Will McKenzie be able to keep calm and support her ex-husband in such a delicate moment? 

Only by staying tuned will we know. If we can make a prediction, between Trump and Jeff, he will choose the latter. 

The translator

Lucrezia Pei, from Narni (Rome), studied at the Faculty of Letters with a focus on Languages ​​at the La Sapienza University. He translates from English and French and specializes in editorial training. After working at various publishing houses, he translated two volumes of the goProf series for goWare (part of a series dedicated to leadership and literature) and will soon be responsible for the translation of the third, still unpublished. Some of his short stories have been published, under pseudonyms, in various anthologies.