Her
divorce from the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has made this novelist, and her
private life, a public fascination.
In
her 25 years of marriage to Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos has been a loyal
ambassador for Amazon, the company that made her and her husband the richest
couple in the world.
She
was an integral part of its origin story, driving to Seattle in 1994 while Mr.
Bezos sat in the passenger seat, working on the nascent company’s business
plan. She was Amazon’s first accountant and was involved in its
transformation from a small online bookseller to the e-commerce behemoth it is
today, the second company in American history to be valued at over a trillion dollars.
Ms.
Bezos, 48, is a novelist. But Amazon has defined her public image almost
wholly. The announcement this week that she and her husband would be getting a divorce may
soon change that. A statement signed “Jeff & MacKenzie,” which was first
posted to Mr. Bezos’s Twitter account, read: “After a period of loving
exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our
shared lives as friends.”
The
couple, who have four children, wrote that they see “wonderful futures ahead,
as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals
pursuing ventures and adventures.”
Over
the last few decades, as Amazon grew, Ms. Bezos appeared with her husband at
some high-profile events, including Vanity Fair’s Oscar parties and the Golden
Globes; in 2012, she was a host of the Met Gala. (Amazon also underwrote the
event.) But for the most part, Ms. Bezos has guarded her privacy, preferring to
focus on writing and her children. She could not be reached for comment on this
article.
MacKenzie and Jeff Bezos attended the Met Gala in 2012 and the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in 2018.Evan Agostini/Associated Press
She
has made infrequent forays into the public eye to promote her books and to
defend her husband’s company. In 2013, she posted a scathing one-star
review on Amazon of “The Everything Store,” a book about Amazon
by Brad Stone, to say it was plagued by “numerous factual inaccuracies” and
“full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction.” (Mr. Stone is
a veteran technology reporter. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing his book for The New
York Times, said he told “this story of disruptive innovation with
authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting.”)
Little is known about Ms. Bezos, a private woman who may be
awarded one of the largest divorce settlements to date.
“The Book Worm”
MacKenzie
Tuttle, an aspiring novelist, met her husband at D. E. Shaw, a New York hedge
fund where Mr. Bezos, a computer scientist by training, had become a senior
vice president.
She told Vogue that she took the position of
administrative assistant to pay the bills while she worked on her novels, but
she soon found herself enamored with the laugh of
the man who worked in the next office over. As Ms. Bezos put it in a 2013 interview
with Charlie Rose: “It was love at first listen.”
Within
three months of dating, the two were engaged; they married shortly thereafter
at a resort in West Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Bezos was 30; Ms. Bezos was 23.
She
often described herself as a bookish introvert, especially compared with Mr.
Bezos, a swaggering, infinitely expansive businessman whose chief romantic
desire, he told Wired in 1999,
six years after his wedding, had been to meet someone “resourceful.” (That type
of attraction seems to be mutual. In 2017, at a Summit panel, Mr. Bezos said
that one of his wife’s sayings is: “I would much rather have a kid with nine
fingers than a resourceless kid.”)
Ms.
Bezos’s literary ambitions began early. According to interviews and her author
biography on Amazon (where she coyly notes that she “lives in Seattle with her
husband and four children”), she started writing seriously at age 6, when she finished
a 142-page chapter book titled “The Book Worm.” It was later destroyed in a
flood; Ms. Bezos has said that she now meticulously backs up her work.
At
Princeton, she studied creative writing under the Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Toni Morrison, who hired her as a research assistant for the 1992 novel “Jazz”
and introduced her to her high-powered literary agent, Amanda Urban.
In
Vogue, Ms. Morrison hailed Ms. Bezos as a rare talent, calling her “one of the
best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes.” In 2005 she gave
Ms. Bezos a glowing blurb on her debut novel, “The Testing of Luther Albright,”
calling it, “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”
After
graduating from Princeton in 1992, six years after Mr. Bezos graduated from the
same university, Ms. Bezos took the job that introduced her to the future
e-commerce titan. The couple married in 1993 and moved to Seattle in 1994, the
same year Amazon was incorporated.
Quickly, Ms. Bezos’s identity became enfolded into her
husband’s company, even as she sought to make her mark in a publishing industry
that he worked tirelessly to upend.
Amazon Ambassador
From
the start, Mr. Bezos knew he wanted to disrupt traditional retail businesses
using the internet. He quickly established Amazon as a successful internet
bookstore and then began to diversify, selling music (when that was still
viable), videos, medication and other consumer goods.
His
vision, as told to Chip Bayers and published in a 1999 Wired profile, was
prescient. Mr. Bezos predicted that in 2020:
The vast bulk of store-bought
goods — food staples, paper products, cleaning supplies, and the like — you
will order electronically. Some physical storefronts will survive, but they’ll
have to offer at least one of two things: entertainment value or immediate
convenience.
MacKenzie
Bezos, who first lived with her husband in a rented home in an East Seattle
suburb, was heavily involved in the business at the start: In addition to
working as an accountant, she helped brainstorm names for the company and even
shipped early orders through UPS, according to “The Everything Store.”
“She
was clearly a voice in the room in those early years,” Mr. Stone said in
an interview for this article.
The Bezoses in 2004.Jean-Paul Aussenard/WireImage, via Getty Images
In
1999, they moved into a $10 million mansion in Medina, Wash., and Ms. Bezos
became pregnant with their first child. As they rapidly accumulated wealth, the
Bezos family took pains to preserve the trappings of normalcy.
Ms.
Bezos often drove the four children to school in a Honda, and would then drop
Mr. Bezos at the office, Mr. Stone wrote.
As
the company flourished, Ms. Bezos stepped back and focused on her family and
her literary ambitions.
“Business
wasn’t her passion, and when Amazon took off she wasn’t as involved in the
day-to-day business,” Mr. Stone said.
She
spent a decade on her first novel, often getting up early to write, and signed
with her mentor’s literary agent, Ms. Urban at ICM Partners, who also
represents Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami and Kazuo Ishiguro.
“The
Testing of Luther Albright,” which was published by Harper in 2005 and was
widely embraced by critics, tells the story of an engineer whose professional
and home lives begin to unravel in the 1980s.
In
a review in The New York Times, Kate Bolick called the novel “quietly
absorbing.” The Los Angeles Times named it one of the best books of the year,
and Publishers Weekly praised Ms. Bezos’s “subtle imagination and a startling
talent for naturalism.”
In
2013, Ms. Bezos published her second novel, “Traps,” which follows the journey
of woman named Jessica Lessing, a reclusive film star, as she emerges from
hiding to confront her father, a con man who has been selling her out to the
paparazzi for years. Jessica drives to Las Vegas to meet him, and encounters
three other women: a teen mother, a dog-shelter owner and a former military
bodyguard, who become her allies.
“I would say the biggest theme
in the book is the idea that the things that we worry over the most in life,
the things that we feel trapped by, the mistakes we’ve made, the bad luck that
we come across, the accidents that happen to us, the paradoxes — in the end,
oftentimes those things are the things that we’ll look back and be the most
grateful for,” Ms. Bezos said of the novel during an interview with Charlie
Rose. “They take us where we need to go.”
Knopf
Throughout
their marriage, Mr. Bezos was an enthusiastic supporter of Ms. Bezos’s fiction,
and would clear his schedule to read drafts of her novels, Ms. Bezos told
Vogue. In the acknowledgments of “Traps,” she called him “my most devoted
reader.”
But
Ms. Bezos’s literary career may have been complicated to some extent by her
high-profile husband, who has done more than perhaps any individual in recent
history to transform and sometimes destabilize the book-selling business. Many
independent booksellers, publishers and agents blame Amazon for building a
monopoly that has put independent stores out of business and poses a dire
threat to once thriving chains like Barnes & Noble.
Even
though Amazon splashily introduced its own publishing imprints, Ms. Bezos still
chose traditional houses for her books: Harper and Knopf. (When asked by an
interviewer why Ms. Bezos wasn’t publishing her books through Amazon’s fiction
imprints, Mr. Bezos jokingly described his wife as “the fish that got away.”)
Sales
of her books have been modest: The novels have sold a few thousand print
copies, according to NPD BookScan, which tracks some 85 percent of print sales.
Some independent booksellers refused to stock Ms. Bezos’s novels, according to
a publishing executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Ms. Urban, Ms.
Bezos’s literary agent, declined to comment for this article.
Billion-Dollar Divorce
The
Bezoses were the richest couple in the world; their divorce exists at a level
of wealth that is virtually unprecedented. There have been billion-dollar
divorces, like that of Steve and Elaine Wynn who owned casinos together, and
certainly, technology entrepreneurs have been in and out of divorce court —
most notably Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle who has been wed and unwed
four times.
But
there has never been a divorce with a couple worth an estimated $137 billion,
as Mr. and Ms. Bezos are.
Little
is known about the couple’s financial arrangements. Divorces are governed by
state law, and the Bezoses’ primary residence and business are in Washington
state, a community property state where any income earned or wealth created
during the marriage is to be divided equitably between spouses.
But
some lawyers think it is unlikely that Mr. and Mrs. Bezos will adhere to that guideline
in a predictable manner. If they were to split assets equally, Mr. Bezos could
find the 16.1 percent of Amazon stock he owns halved.
“I’d
imagine they didn’t fight at all over how much wealth each other gets,” said
William Zabel, a founding partner of the law firm Schulte Roth and Zabel, who
has handled many high-profile divorce cases but not worked with the Bezoses.
Probably, he said, “they fought about control.”
Mr.
Zabel represented Wendi Murdoch and Jane Welch in their separations, and said
he thought the Bezoses would almost certainly negotiate a way to split the
value of the Amazon shares while allowing Mr. Bezos the leverage he might need.
The length of time such an agreement remains in place would be part of the
negotiations.
Ms.
Bezos has kept a low profile in recent weeks, and has not been photographed
since the divorce was announced. (Mr. Bezos, by contrast, has continued to
appear publicly and was pictured this month at a Golden Globes after-party with
Lauren Sanchez, a former television anchor he is reportedly seeing.)
It
is unknown what Ms. Bezos will do next, and how the divorce will play out.
There
will be inevitable questions, for instance, about her plans regarding
philanthropy. The Bezoses’ charitable contributions have been modest in the
past. In 2011, they donated $15 million to their alma mater to create a center
to study the brain. The following year, they gave $2.5 million to support a
same-sex marriage referendum in Washington.
In
2017, Mr. Bezos asked his followers on Twitter
for ideas about how better to give, and in September he and Ms.
Bezos announced a $2 billion fund to
help homeless families and start a network of Montessori-inspired
preschools. But Ms. Bezos could pave her own philanthropic path, like
Laurene Powell Jobs, who started her own foundation, the Emerson Collective.
And
if Ms. Bezos continues to write and publish, perhaps she could find a more
receptive audience among independent booksellers. Some publishing executives,
who declined to be quoted on the record, spoke gleefully, at least, of the
blockbuster potential if Ms. Bezos decides to write a memoir.
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