MacKenzie Bezos Says She Is "Grateful" to Have Dissolved Her Marriage to Jeff Bezos
The richest couple in the world just got divorced. Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKezie announced their separation on January 9, 2019 in a joint statement on Twitter, and appeared to confirm that their marriage was officially dissolved in early April. Here’s what we know about the pair’s split so far.
On April 4, Mackenzie Bezos shared that she was "grateful to have finished the process of dissolving [her] marriage with Jeff."
In the statement, which she put out on Twitter, Mackenzie also outlined some financial information about their split. She will be giving her ex-husband her interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin as well as 75 percent of their previously shared Amazon stock.
Read her full statement here:
- MacKenzie Bezos (@mackenziebezos) April 4, 2019
Jeff Bezos also issued a statement on April 4 saying that he is "grateful" to family and friends, and especially to MacKenzie for "reaching out with encouragement and love."
"I'm grateful for her support and for her kindness in this process and am very much looking forward to our new relationship as friends and co-parents," he wrote in the message, which was shared on Twitter. Read his words in full below:
- Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) April 4, 2019
The story of the divorce has become intertwined with that of the National Enquirer.
The day after the couple’s announcement on Twitter, the National Enquirer published an exposé of Jeff Bezos’s affair with Lauren Sanchez. The Enquirer deemed it “the biggest investigation in Enquirer history,” claiming the publication had followed Bezos and Sanchez “across five states and 40,000 miles” to prove that Bezos was cheating on his wife.
The Enquirer’s report included sexually-charged texts that Bezos had sent to Sanchez. This lead Bezos to launch an investigation into how the Enquirer had obtained his texts.
As Bezos claimed in a Medium post, the Enquirer sought to block Bezos’s investigation with “an offer [he] couldn’t refuse.” The tech executive alleged that the Enquirer and its owner, David Pecker, threatened to publish illicit photos of Bezos unless he halted the investigation.
Rather than “capitulate to extortion and blackmail,” Bezos chose to expose the Enquirer’s threat with a public blog post, and included emails and letters as evidence of the publication’s dubious practices. According to USA Today, AMI, the Enquirer's parent company, responded in a statement saying it "believes fervently that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story."
The announcement of their divorce indicated an amicable split.
"We want to make people aware of a development in our lives. As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends," they wrote. Read the tweet in full here:
- Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 9, 2019
They had been married for 25 years.
The couple married in 1993 after meeting at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. in New York. They have four children together. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon the year after he and MacKenzie were married, and she was the company’s first employee.
Reaching a legal agreement likely wasn't a simple process.
Given that Bezos is the richest man in the world, the divorce proceedings are sure to be complicated, even if the couple parts on amicable terms. A lawyer specializing in high net-worth divorces, Frederic J. Siegel, told T&C earlier this month that reaching an agreement in this case would be quite the undertaking. “My guess is that in this case each side would have a main lawyer who is a quarterback leading a team of partners and other lawyers working on it… In other words, if you were getting everybody in a room, you would need a big room,” he said, adding that the Bezos’ high-profile divorce “will definitely go into the record books.”
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