Who Is MacKenzie Bezos?

Author: Jonah Engel Bromwich and Alexandra Alter / Source: New York Times

Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images

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.

Новости СМИ2

She was an integral part of its origin story, driving to Seattle in 1994 while Mr. 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, the second company in American history to be valued at over a trillion dollars.

Ms. 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. A statement signed “Jeff & MacKenzie,” which was first posted to Mr. Bezos’s Twitter account, read: “After a period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.”

The couple, who have four children, wrote that they see “wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.”

Over the last few decades, as Amazon grew, Ms. Bezos appeared with her husband at some high-profile events, including Vanity Fair’s Oscar parties and the Golden Globes; in 2012, she was a host of the Met Gala. (Amazon also underwrote the event.) But for the most part, Ms. Bezos has guarded her privacy, preferring to focus on writing and her children. She could not be reached for comment on this article.

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 one-star review on Amazon of “The Everything Store,” a book about Amazon by Brad Stone, to say it was plagued by “numerous factual inaccuracies” and “full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction.” (Mr. Stone is a veteran technology reporter. Michiko Kakutani, reviewing his book for The New York Times, said he told “this story of disruptive innovation with authority and verve, and lots of well-informed reporting.”)

Little is known about Ms. Bezos, a private woman who may be awarded one of the largest divorce settlements to date.

“The Book Worm”

MacKenzie Tuttle, an aspiring novelist, met her husband at D. E. Shaw, a New York hedge fund where Mr. Bezos, a computer scientist by training, had become a senior vice president.

She told Vogue that she took the position of administrative assistant to pay the bills while she worked on her novels, but she soon found herself enamored with of the man who worked in the next office over. As Ms. Bezos put it in a 2013 interview with Charlie Rose: “It was love at first listen.”

Within three months of dating, the two were engaged; they married shortly thereafter at a resort in West Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Bezos was 30; Ms. Bezos was 23.

She often described herself as a bookish introvert, especially compared with Mr. 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.” (That type of attraction seems to be mutual. In 2017, at a Summit panel, Mr. Bezos said that one of his wife’s sayings is: “I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.”)

Ms. Bezos’s literary ambitions began early. According to interviews and her author biography on Amazon (where she coyly notes that she “lives in Seattle with her husband and four children”), she 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; Ms. Bezos has said that she now meticulously backs up her work.

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.

In Vogue, Ms. Morrison hailed Ms. Bezos as a rare talent, calling her “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes.” In 2005 she gave Ms. Bezos a glowing blurb on her debut novel, “The Testing of Luther Albright,” calling it, “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”

After graduating from Princeton in 1992, six years after Mr. Bezos graduated from the same university, Ms. 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.

Quickly, Ms. Bezos’s identity became enfolded into her husband’s company, even as she sought to make her mark in a publishing industry that he worked tirelessly to upend.