The world’s biggest divorce settlement will be made official this week as Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos hands over a 4% stake in the online shopping giant to his soon-to-be ex-wife MacKenzie Bezos.
A judge is expected to sign legal papers transferring the Amazon shares – worth $38bn (£29bn) – into MacKenzie Bezos’s name. It is by some distance the largest divorce settlement in history the previous record was $2.5bn paid to Jocelyn Wildenstein when she divorced art dealer Alec Wildenstein in 1999.
Following the settlement MacKenzie Bezos, 49, an author, will become the world’s fourth-richest woman, and has already promised to give away at least 50% of her fortune.
MacKenzie, who married Jeff in 1993, a year before he started Amazon from his garage in Seattle, has said she had “a disproportionate amount of money to share” and promised to work hard at giving it away “until the safe is empty”.
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