MacKenzie Bezos keeps $35bn stake in Amazon

Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has reached a divorce settlement with his wife, MacKenzie, which leaves her a 4% stake in Amazon.

Under the terms of the deal, MacKenzie Bezos will hand over her voting power to her husband of 25 years.

She will also give up her interests in the Washington Post newspaper and Mr Bezos’ space travel firm Blue Origin.

Amazon’s stock market value is worth $890.7bn, which means MacKenzie Bezos retains a stake worth more than $35bn.

Ms Bezos made the announcement in a tweet – her first and only one since joining the microblogging website this month – stating that she was “grateful to have finished the process of dissolving my marriage to Jeff with support from each other”.

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The couple had been together since before Mr Bezos set up Amazon in 1994, with Ms Bezos employed as one of the firm’s first members of staff.

Amazon is now vast online retail business which last year generated sales of $232.8bn and has helped Mr Bezos and his family amass a $131bn fortune, according to Forbes magazine.

Ms Bezos is a successful novelist who has written two books, The Testing of Luther Albright and Traps, and was taught by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison who once said of her pupil that she was “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes… really one of the best”.

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