It has been revealed that the stake of MacKenzie Bezos in Amazon was reduced by about $400 million. How the shares were transferred is yet unknown.
MacKenzie Bezos, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has sold $400 million worth of the Amazon stock. The news has come from a filing that Jeff Bezos made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
According to the filing, Jeff Bezos retains sole voting authority over MacKenzie Bezos’ stake that stands at nearly 19.5 million Amazon shares. Notably, it is 200,000 fewer shares than MacKenzie received of their divorce. Those 200,000 shares are worth about $400 million at the current price. It is not yet clear whether MacKenzie Bezos really sold the shares and got money for them, gifted them or otherwise transferred them. The time any transaction took place is also unknown.
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos’ Divorce
Jeff, 54, and MacKenzie, 48, met while working for the same hedge fund, D.E. Shaw in 1992. A year later they married, and in 1994 moved to Seattle. There, the Bezos pair founded Amazon and became the richest couple in history. They were married for 25 years, and have four children together. In 2019, the couple announced their plan to divorce.
As Jeff and MacKenzie explained, their divorce would not have any influence on their friendship. Besides, they looked forward to continuing working together as ‘parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.’
At the time of divorce, Jeff Bezos owned about 79 million shares of Amazon’s stock, which were worth about $130 billion. The shares gave him a 16% stake in the company, making him its largest shareholder by far. He has also retained full voting control of all of the couple’s shares. MacKenzie Bezos, meanwhile, became the second-largest Amazon shareholder, with 19.7 million shares registered in her name.
In addition, in a Twitter statement on April 4, 2019, MacKenzie Bezos said she was granting Jeff Bezos all of her interests in The Washington Post and Blue Origin.
When the couple first announced their divorce, all started discussing the consequences. Running such a company as Amazon brings a number of issues for divorcing billionaires.
Karin J. Lundell, who deals with matrimonial issues at Rower LLC, said:
“Most of the time, it’s valuation issues — how to value assets in business. The publicly traded stocks are easy to value — you don’t want to sell because that causes fluctuation. Business interests that are harder to value and are more complex assets, The Washington Post, we don’t know the value of that.”
But as we see, if desired, it is always possible to work something out. And Bezos’ couple is a prime example.
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