In recent years, the Bezoses had also embarked on charitable ventures together. “I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centers, and the door-desk filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history,” MacKenzie Bezos wrote in an Amazon review of the book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. According to a 1999 Wired interview, she negotiated Amazon’s first freight contracts - from the in-house Starbucks in a Barnes & Noble. When they drove to Seattle to start Amazon, MacKenzie Bezos was reportedly behind the wheel. As Vox’s Gaby Del Valle notes, the two met when they worked at New York hedge fund D.E. MacKenzie Bezos was, by many accounts, instrumental in the founding of Amazon. Still, the couple did have an incentive to present a united front. “Jeff remains focused and engaged on all things Amazon,” Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesperson, told Vox.
The Bezoses wrote their statement together, the source said, and it should be taken at face value. “Then they became separated, and then Jeff started dating Lauren.” “He and Mackenzie have been working on this for a long time, and they worked very hard to fix it,” the source close to the couple told Vox.
TMZ also reported that Bezos and his wife were already separated when his relationship with Sanchez began. We do not know why Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos are getting divorced, or what role, if any, Jeff Bezos’s relationship with Lauren Sanchez played in the split.Ī source close to the Bezoses, who asked to remain anonymous, told Vox that they had separated before Jeff Bezos began dating Sanchez. For the Bezoses, an acrimonious divorce might be bad for business But it’s also a story about relationships, and how they form and dissolve in America today - especially when the people involved are rich and powerful. Regardless of the details of their relationship, they have every reason to portray themselves as friends and partners for the sake of shareholders, grantees, and the millions of Americans watching their every move.Īt this point, the story of the Bezos divorce has become a political one, with allegations of extortion by a company linked to President Trump. Their announcement also sparked immediate questions about the potential division of their vast fortune: Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth estimated at $137 billion. Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos recently started a $2 billion anti-homelessness fund, and speculation about what their divorce will mean for Amazon is already swirling. But there’s also an incentive for high-profile couples to portray their relationship as friendly even when it isn’t, especially if there are shared business or charitable ventures involved. Remaining close can work for some divorced couples, and consciously uncoupling celebrities can serve as models of a less-acrimonious way to split up. The “conscious uncoupling” of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin in 2014 is the most famous example, but others abound, from Larry and Laurie David sharing family dinners after their split to billionaire Tom Steyer pledging to work together on the “dream of justice” with his wife, even as they began living apart. In recent years, the aggressively amicable celebrity divorce has become commonplace - so much so that high-profile couples seem almost expected to trumpet their friendliness after their marriages dissolve. And the fact that the Bezoses decided to present that narrative may be telling. The Enquirer drama complicates the narrative of the Bezoses as “cherished friends” and business partners who just happen not to be in a romantic relationship anymore. In a statement, the National Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, said it was investigating the claims made in Bezos’s post. The placid narrative took another turn in February, when Bezos made headlines with a blog post on Medium saying the publishers of the National Enquirer tried to extort him by threatening to publish explicit selfies between him and Sanchez. Jeff Bezos is stepping down as Amazon’s CEO
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