– By Chinedu Nwaduru, ABH PRESS
World’s richest person, Jeff Bezos and his wife Mackenzie have officially announced their divorce after 25 years of marriage. The CEO of Amazon told the public on Wednesday that he and his wife have decided to go their separate ways – without providing a reason for their divorce.
Posted on his Twitter page, the couple said , ” We want to make people aware of a development in our lives.
“As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.
“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.”
“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.
“Though the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain cherished friends.”
We have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends. If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again”
With a net worth of over $136.2 billion, Bezos is the richest man in the word;and how this divorce will affect his net worth is yet unknown. Owning approximately 16% of the business which is said to make up over 95% of his wealth; Bezos, 54, has held the reins of the e-commercial giant AMAZON which he founded in 1954. He also owns Washington Post and Blue Origin.
Living with their four children in the state of Washington, the state law requires the divorcing couples to equitable share community property,including all income generated during a marriage. If MacKenzie Bezos, 48, does indeed receive half of her husband’s assets, she would be worth more than $68 billion, making her the fifth-richest person in the world. Even a 1% payout would constitute one of the largest divorce settlements in history.
MacKenzie Bezos boasts a successful career in her own right. A creative writing major at Princeton (she served as a research assistant to Toni Morrison), she won the American Book Award for her first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, published in 2005. She also founded the anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolution.
In 2013, MacKenzie Bezos told Vogue Magazine that she had met Jeff when he interviewed her for a job at a hedge fund in New York .
They got engaged after three months of dating and married shortly after, in 1993.
One year later he founded Amazon – which began as an online book retailer.
The company has since expanded into an e-commerce giant.
Amazon was worth $797bn (£634bn) when the US stock market closed on Monday, after rising 3.4% and moving past Microsoft, valued at $789bn.
(Edited from Forbes.com & BBC.co.uk)