The Twitter post in which Jeff Bezos told the world that he and his wife of 25 years, Mackenzie, were divorcing sparked immediate speculation about the effect on his status as the world’s richest man.
It was a topic on which the Twitter post was mum, saying only that the couple expect to remain “partners in ventures and projects” as well as friends. “Though the labels might be different, we remain a family,” they said.
Bezos, 55, the founder of online retail giant Amazon, has a net worth of $137 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index. That includes a 16 percent stake in the company he founded in a Seattle garage in 1994, according to Forbes magazine, as well as the Washington Post, which he bought for $250 million in 2013, and aerospace firm Blue Origin.
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) January 9, 2019
Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother in a 1964, Bezos spent part of his childhood cleaning stalls, castrating cattle, and repairing tractors, according to One Click, a book on his life and the development of Amazon by Richard Brandt. He became so absorbed in tasks at his Montessori elementary school that teachers “had to pick up his chair with him in it to move to a different task at a different table,” Brandt recounted.
Later, Bezos went on to study computer science and electrical engineering at Princeton, after which he worked on Wall Street and became the youngest senior vice president at D.E. Shaw, according to Biography.com. The firm was founded by David Shaw in the late 1980s to develop a new automated trading system from Wall Street and earned a reputation as a great workplace for computer scientists, Brandt wrote.
When Bezos left in 1994 and created Amazon, he funded the fledgling company’s early operations himself, buying 10 million shares for $10,000, or a tenth of a penny per share, according to One Click. When the company went public at $18 a share a few years afterward, his investment was worth $184 million.
Today, Amazon shares trade at $1,661, giving the Seattle-based company a market value of $810 billion. Bezos’ share of that is worth $130.6 billion.
