Page 111 - Forbes - Asia (December 2019 - January 2020)
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FORBES LIFE
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos at a dinner in 2009.
“She should have gotten 50% of
the company,” says Nick Hanauer,
one of Amazon’s first investors.
“MacKenzie was an equal partner
to Jeff in the early days.”
finalized their divorce in July, with MacKenzie getting 25% of
his Amazon stock. That stake is currently worth $36.1 billion,
enough to put her 15th on this year’s Forbes 400. “She should
have gotten 50% of the company,” says Nick Hanauer, one of
Amazon’s first investors. “MacKenzie was an equal partner to
Jeff in the early days.”
In keeping with character, MacKenzie wouldn’t talk for
Ghost this story. To shed some light on her, we spent weeks con-
tacting more than 100 friends and former classmates and co-
workers; even that yielded only a hazy picture, one of an in-
tensely private but talented woman who has, quietly, excelled
Writer with two siblings. At 6, she wrote a 142-page book called
at every stage of her life.
MacKenzie grew up in San Francisco, a middle child
The Book Worm. Her parents, a homemaker and a financial
planner, sent her to Hotchkiss, the Connecticut boarding
MacKenzie Bezos is an author, school, where she graduated a year early. She studied at
an early Amazon employee, Cambridge, then Princeton, where she majored in English;
a billionaire—and isn’t talking. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison was her
thesis advisor. “She was generally a very poised and a quiet
BY NOAH KIRSCH and brilliant presence,” says Jeff Nunokawa, one of her
English professors.
After graduating, she took a job at the hedge fund D.E.
acKenzie Bezos was not fussy, which was Shaw, where she began dating Jeff Bezos, who left to found
helpful, as there was no time for fussiness Amazon in 1994. From the outset, MacKenzie was heavily
at Amazon headquarters in early 1996. She involved. “No one really had job titles. . . so she did just about
Mshared her office with a junior employee in a everything,” says Tod Nelson, another early employee.
space that doubled as the company kitchen. For 12 hours MacKenzie pulled back around the time Amazon went
a day, as workers squeezed by to use the microwave, she public, in 1997, to focus on fiction writing. She kept a low
presided over the accounting. At night she headed to the profile until 2005, when HarperCollins published her first
warehouse to pack orders. She “was a huge contributor,” says novel, The Testing of Luther Albright. Morrison deemed it
Mike Hanlon, Amazon’s seventh employee. “She really is a “a rarity.” MacKenzie followed it in 2013 with Traps.
talented person in a way that I think gets lost when you’re The more recent chapters of her life are largely unknown.
the billionaire’s wife.” In 2018 she and Jeff committed $2 billion to fight homeless-
The mystery around MacKenzie, 49, seems carefully cul-
ness and support nonprofit preschools. In May, as their di-
ELENA SEIBERT tivated. She largely slipped into anonymity after Amazon’s vorce neared completion, she signed the Giving Pledge,
early years and has granted no interviews since January,
promising to donate at least half her wealth. True to form,
when her split from husband Jeff became public. The couple
she hasn’t said a word about where those billions will go. F
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