MacKenzie Bezos to Become the 4th Richest Woman after Her Divorce

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife and partner MacKenzie Bezos have announced their divorce settlement recently. In the settlement, Jeff Bezos will have 75 percent of their Amazon stock and the voting right over the entire Amazon voting shares. While his wife and partner MacKenzie Bezos will have 5 percent stake in the company and $36 billion worth of wealth and thus she becomes one of the wealthiest women in the world.

MacKenzie made the announcement public through a tweet after her divorce with her husband and world’s richest man Jeff Bezos is smoothly carried out, which was otherwise affecting one of the richest companies of the world, with a market capitalization of $890 billion, and the world’s wealthiest person. Their marriage lasted 25 years and the couple has four children.

Jeff Bezos will also have the sole holding in The Washington Post and a space-flight company, Blue Origin. The settlement is going to remove uncertainty over the extent of his continued control over Amazon, a company he founded in the year 1994 and remains its CEO.

After the settlement, 48-year-old MacKenzie Bezos will have about 4 percent of the company. The stake is worth roughly about $36 billion and with this ownership, MacKenzie becomes one of the wealthiest women in the world, next to the women heiresses of the giant stakes in L’Oreal and Walmart.

MacKenzie Bezos, who is also an author of the 2013 best selling novel “Traps”, was the first to come out and speak on the divorce settlement through her tweeter handle.

Her tweet which disclosed the terms and condition of the divorce along with a personal note, “Grateful to have finished the process of dissolving my marriage with Jeff with support from each other and everyone who reached out to us in kindness, and looking forward to the next phase as co-parents and friends... Excited about my own plans. Grateful for the past as I look forward to what comes next”.

Followed by a tweet from Jeff Bezos who echoed MacKenzie and praised her saying, “She has been an extraordinary partner, ally, and mother. She is resourceful and brilliant and loving, and as our futures unroll, I know I'll always be learning from her”.

In the initial days of Amazon, MacKenzie Bezos worked as an accountant and helped Jeff in negotiating with contracts. Jeff and MacKenzie first met as employees at a finance company D.E. Shaw in New York. They married in the year 1993. In 1994, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon as an online bookseller in Seattle, where the couple settled. In recent years she does not have a prominent or public role in Amazon.

Based on his Amazon holdings, Jeff Bezos is worth at least $107 billion. Earlier this year Forbes estimated his worth at $131 billion before the divorce settlement, making him the richest person in the world. The second richest person in the world at the time was the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, who is a neighbor of the Bezos, with about $96.5 billion of wealth, according to Forbes.