MacKenzie Bezos

#74/100 in #100extraordinarywomen 

MacKenzie Sheri Bezos (née Tuttle) is an American novelist and philanthropist. She is the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to whom she was married from 1993 until their divorce in 2019. She has been in the news where mostly she was discussed “for landing on the Forbes list thanks to her divorce to the richest man in the world” or for basically getting her wealth from her ex-husband. That is exactly why I chose to put her on this list because in my personal opinion, she very much deserves every penny she got off her own accord and she deserves to be on that list because of her own merits. 

But first about the woman herself… MacKenzie S. Tuttle was born on April 7, 1970, in San Francisco, California, to a financial planner father and a homemaker mother, and she was a middle child with two siblings. At 6, she wrote a 142-page book called “The Book Worm”. Her parents sent her to Hotchkiss, the Connecticut boarding school, where she graduated a year early. She studied at Cambridge, then Princeton, where she majored in English; Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison was her thesis advisor. “She was generally a very poised and a quiet and brilliant presence,” says Jeff Nunokawa, one of her English professors. After graduating, she took a job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, where she began dating Jeff Bezos, who left to found Amazon in 1994. MacKenzie was a research associate at the firm where Bezos was a vice president. Her office was next door to his and three months after they began dating, in 1993, they were married. Twenty Five years and four children (three sons and one daughter adopted from China) later, the couple announced their divorce. 

Apparently, there was no prenup. And in Washington, where the couple lives, assets acquired after a prenup-less marriage are split 50/50. If you're married to the world's richest person (Jeff Bezos' net worth is USD 137 billion!) who is entirely self-made, do you deserve to get half? For MacKenzie Bezos, absolutely. For one simple reason: There would be no Amazon without her. 

While at D.E. Shaw, Bezos came up with the idea for Amazon. MacKenzie was supportive from the beginning, despite the high probability that his venture would fail (almost all startups at the time did and still do). Brad Stone writes in “The Everything Store”, “At the time, Bezos was newly married, with a comfortable apartment on the Upper West Side and a well-paying job. While MacKenzie said she would be supportive if he decided to strike out on his own, the decision was not an easy one.” 

In 1994, at age 30 and 24 respectively, Jeff and MacKenzie decided to blow up their cushy lives. They road tripped across the country in search of a new home and headquarters for Amazon. MacKenzie drove while Jeff Bezos punched out a business plan and revenue projections in the passenger seat. After starting in Texas and buying an old beat up car, they wound up in Seattle. The pair brainstormed the name “Amazon” together after almost choosing a different name, Relentless.com. MacKenzie became Amazon's first accountant, despite the fact that she was an aspiring novelist. 

MacKenzie Bezos was not fussy, which was helpful, as there was no time for fussiness at Amazon headquarters in early 1996. She shared her office with a junior employee in a space that doubled as the company kitchen. For 12 hours a day, as workers squeezed by to use the microwave, she presided over the accounting. At night she headed to the warehouse to pack orders. She did a lot of other grunt work, like most early startup employees do, from driving book orders to the post office to handling the company's bank account and line of credit. She met early Amazon investor John Doerr and partied with the team in Mexico after Amazon's IPO. From the outset, MacKenzie was heavily involved. “No one really had job titles . . . so she did just about everything,” says Tod Nelson, another early employee. She “was a huge contributor,” says Mike Hanlon, Amazon’s seventh employee. “She really is a talented person in a way that I think gets lost when you’re the billionaire’s wife.” She largely slipped into anonymity after Amazon’s early years at least as far as her presence in the company is concerned. She was a founding member of Amazon, but there's another reason she deserves half of the USD 137 billion Amazon fortune. 

Beyond her early role in the company is the significant role any spouse plays in a partner's career. Both Warren Buffett and Sheryl Sandberg say that the most important career decision you can make is who you marry. Sure, there's the sacrifice one partner might make to allow the other to pursue a demanding career. But that's not what Warren Buffett was getting at. “Marry the right person,” he said at the 2009 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. “I'm serious about that. It will make more difference in your life. It will change your aspirations, all kinds of things.” Would the notion of opening an online bookstore have taken hold of Jeff Bezos as forcibly if he hadn't met MacKenzie? Would he have executed on that vision in the same way, hired the same people and taken the same kinds of risks with a different partner? Obviously these are impossible questions to answer. But it's not outrageous to suggest that a person's motivations, attitudes and goals are influenced by the most important person in their life. Regardless of whether a spouse is listed as a partner on a business masthead, many couples operate as a team focused on a grander, overarching enterprise and working in tandem to achieve common goals. That's part of the reason why many state laws recognize the concept of community property. Buffett has said that without his first wife Susi, who died in 2004, he would not have built his fortune. “What happened with me would not have happened without her,” he said in a 2017 HBO documentary. What happened to Jeff Bezos would not have happened without MacKenzie. 

MacKenzie pulled back around the time Amazon went public, in 1997, to focus on fiction writing. She kept a low profile until 2005, when HarperCollins published her first novel, “The Testing of Luther Albright”. Morrison deemed it “a rarity.” MacKen­zie followed it in 2013 with “Traps”. While Jeff Bezos was pursuing his own dream, MacKenzie had largely sacrificed her own which she eventually took up once Jeff’s dream baby was in a more comfortable position. When she needs to write, MacKenzie retreats to her own small apartment, where she writes until it's time to pick the kids up from school. Until 2013, MacKenzie still drove their four kids to school and then dropped Jeff off to work in their Honda. Moreover, In 2014, she founded the anti-bullying organization Bystander Revolution, where she serves as executive director. 

So, when the couple announced their intent to divorce in January 2019, MacKenzie Bezos deserved half of the Amazon fortune and not the trolls around becoming rich for nothing. She eventually settled for half of what she deserved both legally and morally. They divorced in mid 2019. As part of the divorce settlement, Jeff transferred 25% of his Amazon stake to MacKenzie, which was 4% of the company; making her the third richest woman in the world and the 15th richest person on the Forbes list. 

Moreover, less than two months after finalizing her divorce from the richest man in the world, MacKenzie Bezos declared her intention to give away at least half her wealth – currently USD 36.6 billion – over her lifetime or in her will. In a letter announcing that she had signed Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge, MacKenzie wrote, “I have a disproportionate amount of money to share. My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.” True to form, she hasn’t said a word about where those billions will go. It also not-so-subtly brings to mind another person who has “a disproportionate amount of money to share” but has chosen to keep it mostly to himself and/or to build spaceships. (Jeff Bezos had once said in an interview that he couldn’t think of a way to spend his vast fortune outside of funding for-profit rocket-ship company Blue Origin.) 

Source: Google and Wikipedia.