“You could have a 75-25 split, a 60-40 split, a 50-50 split,” says Bonnie Frost, a family-law attorney in New Jersey whose clients range from “the regular Joe to somebody who’s super wealthy.” In states without community-property laws, the default is a principle called “equitable distribution,” under which divorcés’ stuff is instead divided up based on a range of factors, including the role that each spouse played in building up a fortune. (Amazon did not respond to a request for information about how the couple’s assets will be divided.) And since it’s not known whether they signed any postmarital agreements-which might have happened years ago, when Amazon was transitioning from scrappy start-up to tech colossus-Mindel’s best guess is that everything’s going to get split in half. But according to the gossip site TMZ, they didn’t have a premarital agreement. What would change all of this, though, is if the Bezoses had, sometime before their divorce, hammered out an agreement about what would happen should their marriage end such an agreement would supersede the dictates of community-property laws. (Perhaps the Bezoses could entrust a close adviser with casting the deciding vote in situations when they disagree about Amazon’s corporate decisions.) Another possibility, Mindel says, is that the stock could be transferred into a single entity over which the former husband and wife would have joint control that arrangement might put Amazon’s investors and corporate directors more at ease, given that there wouldn’t be two separate shareholders. That would wrest the title of world’s richest man away from Jeff (it would revert to Bill Gates), and make MacKenzie the world’s richest woman, overtaking the L’Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers. “In the case of the Bezoses, since they were married at the time that he moved from Wall Street to start developing Amazon, we would assume that everything in Amazon is going to be community property,” Mindel says.Ī possible outcome, then, is that Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos each end up with about $65 billion in Amazon stock. Divorce filers in Washington State, where the Bezoses live, are subject to a legal standard on the books in about one-fifth of states called “community property,” under which everything accumulated during a marriage will be split 50-50 by the courts. The main determinant of what happens to all these assets is location-where the couple reside-because laws can vary significantly by state. “From comprehensive in-the-box Barbie dolls and rare guitar collections to bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, everything you’ve acquired as a couple must have a number put on it,” writes Ken Brewe, a lawyer in Washington State, in a post on his firm’s website. “That makes the divorces incredibly more complicated than, say, two schoolteachers who get divorced, with retirement accounts and savings accounts and cars and houses,” says Steve Mindel, a family-law attorney in Los Angeles who works with high-net-worth clients.Īssessing the value of stocks can be an involved process, but those are far from the strangest assets that have to be quantified. Often, very affluent people hold their wealth in stocks, and in recent decades many of them have been compensated with highly lucrative stock options in rapidly growing companies. One major difference is the nature of couples’ assets. Read more: The Bezos divorce is a revealing media moment But those who work with really, really rich people know from past experience that their divorces stand apart from those of regular folks. How will that process unfold and who will end up with how much? It’s common for very wealthy couples to come to an agreement out of court, usually in the interest of privacy. One such adventure, even if it’s not what the Bezoses had in mind when crafting their tweet, will be divvying up the couple’s enormous financial holdings, which are estimated to add up to about $137 billion. In a joint statement posted on Twitter, the couple said they see “wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.” On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and currently the richest person in the world, and MacKenzie Bezos, a novelist, announced that they are ending their marriage after 25 years.
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