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Jeff Bezos is SICK: Amazon CEO will lose billions after not signing prenup
Some say marriage is a business decision.
While, ideally, in a perfect world two individuals deciding to spend the rest of their lives exclusively with each other is endearing and cute, an irrefutable fact is that there’s a lot more at play when those vows are exchanged than the euphoria of infatuation.
Think of it this way: it’s two lives merging; and if you know anything about mergers, the objective is to improve the profitability of the two parties involved.
As much as Hollywood would like to sell these unions as fairytale matches that are made in heaven, in reality, they’re actually closer to being partnerships. In fact, historically, marriages in cultures across the world have been based on everything but romance.
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In some Indian customs you don’t get to pick your spouse and in the medieval times, kings and queens were paired for power. When you factor tax breaks, marital laws by state and who gets what when you die, it would almost be irresponsible not to think of it as a transaction.
With that being said, marriage might just be Jeff Bezos worst business deal of his life.
The Amazon CEO and wife MacKenzie Bezos announced Wednesday that they were getting divorced, ending their 25-year union. And because he didn’t have a prenup, half of his reported $137 billion fortune is on the line.
Now, Jeff Bezos is a smart man. Among founding the e-commerce giant, Amazon, he owns The Washington Post, has a real estate empire, totaling some 400,000 acres, and has already come up with a way to deliver packages to our door by drone.
Hell, he even copped Whole Foods for $13.7 billion last year! So why in the world then didn’t he protect his assets, especially being that he was having an affair?
Hours after the announcement, the National Enquirer reported the split was due to an ongoing relationship between the Amazon chief and Lauren Sanchez, a 49-year old television host and the wife of a Hollywood agent, Patrick Whitesell.
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 9, 2019
Although the announcement of the split came Wednesday, the Post reported the break had long been established and the Twitter post was made because they knew Bezos and Sanchez were going to be seen in Los Angeles on Sunday at the Golden Globes. The Post quotes an unnamed person close to Bezos as saying,
“The news today was not a surprise to her. Lauren was with Jeff at the Golden Globes because they are dating.”
More couples are looking to prenups. Subscription legal services site LegalShield.com says it has seen a sevenfold increase in the use of prenups among its members over the past year.
A 2016 survey from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 62 percent of respondents had seen a rise in the number of clients seeking a prenup over the preceding three years, and 51 percent noted an uptick specifically among millennial clients.
Bezos, who met and married his wife long before his fortune, obviously didn’t think out his extra-marital affairs even though that’s become the norm. Subscription legal services site Legal Shield reports it has seen a sevenfold increase in the use of prenups among its members over the past year.
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A 2016 survey from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that 62 percent of respondents had seen a rise in the number of clients seeking a prenup over the preceding three years, and 51 percent noted an uptick specifically among millennial clients.
Not to mention that when it comes to Bezos, it’s just different. It’s common for wealthy people to hold their wealth in stocks — Bezos owns 16 percent of Amazon — and in recent decades many of them have been compensated with highly lucrative stock options in rapidly growing companies.
Steve Mindel, a family law attorney in Los Angeles who works with high net worth clients, tells the Atlantic,
“That makes the divorces incredibly more complicated than, say, two schoolteachers who get divorced, with retirement accounts and savings accounts and cars and houses.”
It’s likely that the couple will file a divorce in Washington, where community property rules that all earnings and income during the marriage are split 50/50. Whether that will be the agreement is yet to be seen.
Whether she takes half of not Bezos will still rank as the top four wealthiest men, but would make MacKenzie the world richest woman.
It’s not certain whether Bezos will marry again but one could gather that he’ll make sure he won’t set himself up to lose billions again.