Update: Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos do not have a prenuptial agreement, as reported by TMZ.
Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, posted a joint statement on Twitter this morning announcing their divorce. The Amazon CEO, who is worth $137 billion, and his wife have been married for 25 years. Their split could mean she'll become the richest woman in the world.
"We feel incredibly lucky to have found each other and deeply grateful for every one of the years we have been married to each other. If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again," they wrote in the statement.
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Bezos owns 16% of Amazon, the company he founded in 1994 which had a revenue of $177.9 billion in 2017 and now employs more than half a million people around the world. In 2013, he bought The Washington Post for $250 million. Bezos also owns Blue Origin, a space exploration company, which is funded with $1 billion per year of Amazon stock.
When it comes to property, the couple has a lot of it. Their lake house in Medina, WA — home base for the couple and their four children — is worth an estimated $25 million. In 2016, Bezos bought a 27,000 square foot home in Washington, D.C. — the biggest residence in the city — for $23 million, and then in 2017, began a $12 million renovation on the home. Bezos also owns a $25 million home in Beverly Hills and three linked apartments in NYC worth $17 million.
The couple met in 1993, when Bezos interviewed MacKenzie at the hedge fund where he was working, and got married six months later. In 1994, they moved from NYC to Seattle, where Bezos founded a little online bookstore called Amazon in his garage. MacKenzie was one of Amazon's first employees and worked as an accountant for the tech company. Amazon went public in 1997, with an initial public offering of $18 per share, rendering him a millionaire soon after. By 1999, he was included on Forbes' list of world billionaires. He has been the world's richest man since 2017. In September of last year, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos pledged to donate $2 billion to helping homeless families and creating preschools in low-income communities.
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Washington is a community property state, which means that all earnings and property acquired during the marriage are considered community property. So in the event of divorce, all assets are split 50/50, unless there is a prenup (or postnup). Seeing as Bezos earned his wealth from Amazon once he was already married to MacKenzie, MacKenzie stands to receive half of the earnings and property they earned during their 25-year marriage.
If the divorce does halve his net worth to $68.5 billion, Bezos will still rank in as the #3 richest man in the world behind Bill Gates and Warren Buffet — and MacKenzie will be on the list right next to him.