Heard of Jeff Bezos? How about a little outfit called Amazon?
The founder and CEO of the online retail Goliath is the richest man in the world as
of 2020. But the saying goes: Behind every great man is a great woman. In this case,
that's his former wife MacKenzie Bezos, or as she’s known today, MacKenzie Scott.
Long before attending college and marrying a future billionaire, then-MacKenzie Tuttle was just
a normal kid. She was raised in San Francisco along with two siblings. Her father was a
financial planner and her mother stayed home with the kids. Young MacKenzie was shy and studious,
spending lots of time alone in her bedroom writing. She wrote her first chapter book,
a story called The Book Worm, at age six, but it was destroyed by a flood in her childhood home.
Young MacKenzie was educated at Connecticut’s Hotchkiss boarding school,
and Forbes reports that she graduated a year early. After this came Princeton,
where the aspiring author majored in English. However, following graduation,
MacKenzie took a job at a hedge fund, a decision that would shape the rest of her life.
She met her future husband and later billionaire Jeff Bezos at their mutual workplace. According
to Forbes, the pair first crossed paths in 1992 while working at hedge fund D.E. Shaw in New York
City. MacKenzie interviewed with Jeff and he offered her a job, although she took a job in
another department. As luck would have it, her assigned office was right next door to Jeff’s.
The pair dated for 3 months before getting engaged.
Shortly thereafter they married, when Jeff was 30 and MacKenzie was 23. The newlyweds
packed up everything and moved to Seattle, Washington the following year in 1994.
Amazon came into the picture that same year. Yes, Jeff is the founder and CEO of Amazon,
but his then-wife MacKenzie played a big part in the development back when the company was a humble
startup. According to the New York Times, she helped develop the early business plan,
brainstormed names, and mailed out early orders via USPS. Obviously, the company grew somewhat
in the years to come, becoming the world’s second trillion dollar company in February 2020.
“To me, ya know, watching your spouse, somebody that you love, have an adventure,
what is better than that? And being part of that!”
In keeping with her childhood aspirations, MacKenzie established herself as an author
in the years after Amazon’s founding. As an undergraduate at Princeton University where
she earned her degree in English, Forbes reports that she worked with the famous
American author Toni Morrison as a research assistant. Bezos completed her debut novel,
The Testing of Luther Albright, after 8 years of work while raising her kids.
After the release in 2005, she got to work on the follow up. Staying consistent,
she released her second novel, Traps, in 2013. Ironically, MacKenzie went with traditional
publishing houses — HarperCollins and Knopf Doubleday — for her two novels,
despite her husband's own publishing companies under the Amazon umbrella.
MacKenzie Scott has four children. Even as their wealth grew, MacKenzie would often drop
the kids off at school in the family Honda, then take father Jeff to work at the office.
“What’s with the Honda?"
"Ahahahahaha. This is a perfectly good car haha.”
However, in January 2019, after 25 years of marriage,
Jeff Bezos tweeted a statement signed by himself and his wife:
"We have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends."
In the ensuing divorce, MacKenzie gave Jeff all of her equity in the Washington Post, as well
as a large chunk of her Amazon stock. However, by the time the divorce was finalized in July,
a full 25% of Jeff’s Amazon stake had been transferred to MacKenzie, a holding that, as of
October 2019, was worth $36.1 billion, thus making Scott one of the richest women in the world.
The Bezoses gave millions to various causes during their marriage, such as $15 million to their alma
mater and $2.5 million to support the same-sex marriage referendum in Washington in 2014.
But MacKenzie has turned up the heat since her divorce, signing the Giving Pledge in 2019. With
this, she joins many of America’s richest people in promising to donate the majority of their
wealth to charity over the course of their lives. MacKenzie Scott said in her Giving Pledge profile:
"I won't wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty."
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