Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos and wife MacKenzie to divorce after 25 years of marriage

Billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon and wife MacKenzie Bezos have decided to get a divorce after 25 years of marriage, the couple said in a joint statement on Twitter on Wednesday.

Jeff Bezos, 54, is the world’s richest person, with a fortune that has soared to more than $160 billion (£125.3 billion) thanks to his stake in Amazon, which again became Wall Street’s most valuable company this week, surpassing Microsoft Inc.

“After a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends,” the couple said in the statement.

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MacKenzie Bezos, 48, is an author who grew up in San Francisco, according to a 2013 profile in Vogue magazine. She attended Princeton University and met her husband when interviewing for a job at a New York hedge fund, according to the magazine. The pair have four children.

“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,” the statement continued. “If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again.”

https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1083004911380393985

Bezos, 54, and MacKenzie, 48, met and got married while working at D.E. Shaw, a New York-based hedge fund, in the early 90s. Shortly after, they packed up and moved across the country to Seattle, where Bezos launched Amazon.

At a Business Insider event in Berlin last April, Jeff Bezos said MacKenzie’s support was instrumental when he founded Amazon as an online bookseller in 1994, and that she did the accounting for the company in its first year.

“When you have loving and supportive people in your life, like MacKenzie, my parents, my grandfather, my grandmother, you end up being able to take risks,” he said at the event.

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Though the couple will be divorced soon, they have said in a joint statement that they look forward to continuing working together as “parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.”