Biggest divorce settlement in history if there isn't a prenup, there doesn't appear to be.
:-)
THE NEW YORK POST
Jeff Bezos and wife MacKenzie announce divorce — unclear if the couple has a prenuptial agreement
By 0 and Lia Eustachewich
Published: Jan 9, 2019 11:49 a.m. ET
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/je...ent-2019-01-09
The Amazon founder and his wife are divorcing after 25 years of marriage.
Amazon AMZN, +0.47% CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, are divorcing after 25 years of marriage, the couple announced Wednesday.
“We want to make people aware of a development in our lives,” tweeted Bezos, the world’s richest person. “As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separate, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.”
He continued: “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.”
The 54-year-old sits at the top of Forbes world’s billionaires ranking, with a real-time worth of $137.4 billion.
It’s unclear if the couple has a prenuptial agreement.
They reside in Washington state, which is a “community property state” — meaning divorcing couples without a prenup split assets 50-50, TMZ reported.
The Bezos own five homes in Medina, Washington, Beverly Hills, Van Horn, Texas, DC and Manhattan — making Jeff the 25th biggest landowner in the nation, Business Insider said.
The couple met in New York at hedge fund D.E. Shaw when Jeff, the company’s vice president, interviewed MacKenzie for a job, according to Business Insider.
MacKenzie, a Princeton graduate, landed the gig as a research associate and the two office neighbors fell in love — fast.
MacKenzie, who was 23 at the time and made the first move by asking Jeff out to lunch, was smitten.
“My office was next door to his, and all day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,” she recalled in a 2013 interview with Vogue. “How could you not fall in love with that laugh?”
Within three months, they were engaged and, three months later in 1993, they were hitched.
Jeff also gushed about his longtime love.
“I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot, but I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her, so I knew exactly what her SATs were,” he told Vogue.
In 1994, the newlyweds quit their Wall Street jobs and moved cross country to Seattle, where Jeff launched Amazon. He hired MacKenzie as an accountant — as one of the online bookstore’s first employees.
“To me, watching your spouse, somebody that you love, have an adventure — what is better than that?” MacKenzie told CBS.
The couple went on to have four children.
MacKenzie, 48, is an award-winning novelist who penned the “The Testing of Luther Albright” in 2005 and “Traps” eight years later.
At Princeton, where Jeff also attended, she studied under legendary author Toni Morrison, who told Vogue that she was “one of the best students” she ever had.
Last year, Jeff and MacKenzie launched the homeless charity Day One Fund together.
In his statement on Wednesday, he hinted that he and his soon-to-be ex-wife would continue working together.
“We’ve had such a great life together as a married couple, and we also see wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures,” Jeff wrote. “Though the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain cherished friends.”
[Reply]
Originally Posted by Amnorix:
There's a point at which the money becomes irrelevant. If he goes from $137 billion to $70, is it really going to change a single thing about his life? Yeah, no.
More important is the voting control over Amazon. That's all that likely matters to him.
Sometimes these wealth things befuddle me a bit, though. He owns a lot of Amazon stock that would be worth that much if he sold it. But he hasn't sold it, and it doesn't pay a dividend at all. So that wealth is not generating any income for him, right?
Now, in an extreme case like this he could be selling $500 million a year of stock to generate income, and it'll last his whole life. But he's still selling the stock to do that, which is selling an asset. The other $136.5 billion isn't making him a penny to cover his day to day living csts if I understand it right, unless there's some accounting chicanery you can do when you're rich like that.
If the guy wants to retain control of the company, maybe he'll have to get a night job at Chick Fil A or something.
[Reply]
Originally Posted by Rain Man:
Sometimes these wealth things befuddle me a bit, though. He owns a lot of Amazon stock that would be worth that much if he sold it. But he hasn't sold it, and it doesn't pay a dividend at all. So that wealth is not generating any income for him, right?
Now, in an extreme case like this he could be selling $500 million a year of stock to generate income, and it'll last his whole life. But he's still selling the stock to do that, which is selling an asset. The other $136.5 billion isn't making him a penny to cover his day to day living csts if I understand it right, unless there's some accounting chicanery you can do when you're rich like that.
If the guy wants to retain control of the company, maybe he'll have to get a night job at Chick Fil A or something.
Yeah, it gets complicated under these circumstances. The control aspect is the only one Bezos should really care about. Certainly his wife shouldn't get a seat on the board and have as much influence as she would nominally be entitled to if she owned X% of the company.
My assumption, since it sounds like everything is amicable, is that they are structuring around this somehow. Let's face it, nobody "needs" anywhere near $70 billion in cash, so maybe there is a contract that he will pay for her expenses up to, whatever, $1 billion per year, and that otherwise the stock transfers to her upon his death. I have no idea. I've never even thought about how to handle soemthing crazy like this.
You might be able to do something clever involving putting the shares into a trust where she gets the economic benefits of the stock while he retains voting control. Maybe. Nuts.
I'll post about a FAR worse situation.
[Reply]
