If Mackenzie Bezos, the wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had just 1% of his divorce fortune, she would have entered the list of the richest women in the world. And if she had achieved half of the property, she would have deprived her ex-husband of the title of the richest man in the world.
In the divorce, Mackenzie refused to claim shares in The Washington Post and Bezos’ space company Blue Origin. The publishing business cannot be called easy, and Blue Origin is unprofitable – Bezos invests about $ 1 billion in it annually. Of the 16% of Amazon shares owned by Bezos, Mackenzie will take a quarter. At the same time, the ex-husband retains the right to vote with her package.
As a result, Jeff Bezos retained 12% of the shares of an online retailer worth almost $ 115 billion. He grasped the title of the world’s first rich man, not allowing himself to overtake Bill Gates with his $ 107 billion he would be the leader).
Mackenzie’s 4% stake in Amazon is valued at $ 39 billion. She was ranked 22nd on the list of the richest people in the world according to Bloomberg and became the third richest woman. It is second only to the heiress of the L’Oréal empire, Françoise Bettencourt-Myers (almost $ 50 billion), and the only daughter of the founder of Walmart supermarkets, Alice Walton (about $ 44 billion). The closest rival, the granddaughter of Mars founder Jacqueline Mars, owns $ 24 billion, and China’s richest woman, Yang Huiyan holds $ 22 billion.
Mackenzie will take only 25% of Jeff Bezos’ assets, but deserves half – after all, without her, there would be no Amazon – Business Insider came out with this headline. As Warren Buffett and Sheryl Sandberg have said, the most vital decision you can make is choosing who to marry.
How Mackenzie met Bezos
Mackenzie Tuttle was born in 1970 in San Francisco. My father earned money through financial planning, and my mother took care of the house. Mackenzie was a shy girl and spent hours in the nursery writing stories. By the age of six, she firmly understood who she wanted to be, and wrote her first book, Bookworm, 142 pages.
Mackenzie grew up and went to Princeton to attend the courses of the future Nobel laureate in literature Toni Morrison. For a while, Mackenzie even worked for Morrison – collecting data for her new novel “Jazz”. And then I decided to write the book myself.
After receiving her diploma in 1992, Mackenzie set to work. To pay the bills, the young lady worked part-time as a dishwasher, waitress, clothing salesman, cashier, nanny, etc. But all this did not provide enough funds. And Mackenzie, sighing, went to get a permanent job at the D.E. Shaw Foundation in New York.
It was there that she met Jeff. He interviewed and later joked: “My wife is resourceful, clever, wise, and hot. I was lucky to see her resume before we met, and I also knew accurately what her grades were. “
Love the first sound
Mackenzie got to work in a different department, in which Jeff worked, but the offices were in the neighborhood: “For many days I listened to his wonderful laughter – how could I resist?” She once joked that they had “love at first sound.”
Jeff was ripe for marriage by then. He had girls, but none were suitable for the role of a wife. “I was looking for a woman who would be able to get me out of jail in a third-world country,” he recalled in an interview with TechCrunch. These are rare, so the efforts of the future billionaire have long remained futile. Although he approached the problem in a business-like manner: he organized a “stream of girls” by analogy with the “stream of deals” and constantly sorted out all the new candidates – sometimes he went on blind dates, then signed up for pair dances …
The first step in the relationship was made by Mackenzie: she invited Bezos to dine together. Three months later, they were engaged. Three more later they got married. It was 1993 when she was 23 years old, he was 29.
Soon, Bezos began to convince his wife that it was time to start his own business. He was amazed at how rapidly Internet commerce was growing. But what will his store be selling? Bezos did a mini-survey of the best-selling online products. But the final word was said by Mackenzie, who is familiar with the literary world. It is how Amazon started selling books.
For the sake of a startup, the newlyweds quit a promising job with a solid salary and a decent apartment. In 1994, the couple got into the car and in five days drove from New York to Seattle, closer to one of the largest book distributors in the country – Ingram. Mackenzie has been driving all these days. And Jeff was frantically sketching out a business plan in the back seat. Did Mackenzie understand what they were getting themselves into? Probably no. “I have no business acumen. But I saw how passionate Jeff was, ”she told Vogue. She echoed the same thought to CBS: “I’m not a businessman <…> Seeing your husband, whom you love, get involved in an adventure – what could be better than this, better than being involved in it?”
