In her 25 years of marriage to Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos has been a loyal ambassador for Amazon, the company that made her and her husband the richest couple in the world. She was an integral part of its origin story, driving to Seattle in 1994 while Bezos sat in the passenger seat, working on the nascent company’s business plan. She was Amazon’s first accountant and was involved in its transformation from a small online bookseller to the e-commerce behemoth it is today.
Bezos, 48, is a novelist. But Amazon has defined her public image almost wholly. The announcement this week that she and her husband would be getting a divorce may soon change that. Over the last few decades, as Amazon grew, Bezos appeared with her husband at some high-profile events, including Vanity Fair’s Oscar parties. She has made infrequent forays into the public eye to promote her books and to defend her husband’s company. In 2013, she posted a scathing review on Amazon of The Everything Store, a book about Amazon by Brad Stone, to say it was plagued by “factual inaccuracies” and “full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction.”
Little is known about Bezos, a private woman who may be awarded one of the largest divorce settlements to date. MacKenzie Tuttle, an aspiring novelist, met her husband at DE Shaw, a New York hedge fund where Bezos, a computer scientist by training, had become a senior vice president. Within three months of dating, the two were engaged; they married shortly thereafter. She often described herself as a bookish introvert, especially compared with Bezos, a swaggering, infinitely expansive businessman whose chief romantic desire, he told Wired in 1999, six years after his wedding, had been to meet someone “resourceful.” Bezos started writing seriously at age 6, when she finished a 142-page chapter book titled The Book Worm. It was later destroyed in a flood. At Princeton, she studied creative writing under the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who hired her as a research assistant for the 1992 novel Jazz and introduced her to her high-powered literary agent, Amanda Urban. After graduating from Princeton in 1992, six years after Bezos graduated from the same university, Bezos took the job that introduced her to the future e-commerce titan. The couple married in 1993 and moved to Seattle in 1994, the same year Amazon was incorporated.
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