Jeff Bezos has been married for 25 years, which predates the founding of Amazon by less than a year.
Bezos was not super-rich prior to starting Amazon in 1994, but he was Princeton-educated, had worked various high-level IT/management jobs by then, and was already doing quite well.
For whatever reason, he chose not to get a prenup when he married novelist Mackenzie Tuttle in 1993. He was 29 at the time, and already had decent money to his name, as well as very positive career prospects.
He's the world's richest man, worth about $137 billion.
He and his wife just announced their intention to get a divorce, after a long separation. Since all of the Amazon money came AFTER they were married, it is possible she will get half, making it the largest divorce settlement ever, by a wide margin.
Reportedly Bezos had an affair. It doesn't appear to be a purely sexual affair, but rather a dating affair, where he has been secretly seeing Good Day LA Host Lauren Sanchez.
I always felt that divorce laws were very unfair to very wealthy people. If one person was responsible for earning all of the money, there needs to be a cap (even if it's set fairly high) regarding the amount of money the spouse can get. There is no reason that Bezos' wife should be entitled to almost $70 billion simply for being married to the guy who founded Amazon. I agree she shouldn't walk away anything short of wealthy, but there does need to be some common-sense recognition of who actually made the money.
This is especially true because the spouse can rarely claim in those situations that they gave up the opportunity to have made the same money by getting married. Clearly his wife would have earned only a tiny percentage of that amount of money if she never married him.
I have always admired Bezos for a few reasons.
First, he came from humble beginnings. His mom was a high school student. His dad was gone while he was a toddler, and his mom ended up marrying another man. Bezos was the name of the second man, who adopted him after his natural dad ran off. He worked at McDonald's as a teenager in high school. This was just a really smart guy who succeeded at every level of school, and then had an excellent business sense.
Furthermore, his site was one of the few which weathered the 2001 dot-com bust, and in fact grew during that time. He never wanted the website to be gimmicky, flashy, or beautiful. He wanted the interface to be simple, familiar, and easy. He wanted customer service to be friendly and overly generous. He actually empowered his overseas telephone reps to make decisions regarding customer credit and other issues, which is highly unusual. Most companies have overseas reps reading from a script and following draconian rules.
Pretty much everything he does manages to work, and he has shown that a large company can still be wildly successful while giving good customer service.
This affair probably wasn't about looks.
Laura Sanchez has the "botched plastic surgery" look:
Mackenzie Bezos is still pretty for her age:
I'm guessing Bezos just drifted apart from his wife (probably due to working so much), and somehow got to know Laura Sanchez and felt a connection with her.
I wonder if more guys will starr getting prenups after this gargantuan divorce settlement is announced.