Who is jeff bezos wife

Mackenzie Scott, the woman who helped her ex-husband build the Amazon empire, has quietly been thriving after the most expensive divorce settlement in history.

The billionaire philanthropist remarried two years after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, tying the knot with Dan Jewett, a science teacher at her children’s school.

Scott donated over $4.1 billion during 2020 to food banks and emergency relief funds amid the Covid-19 pandemic. That followed donations of $1.7 billion to causes including racial equality, LGBTQ rights, public health and climate change announced earlier in 2020, when she also revealed she would be dropping Bezos as a surname.

She has now given a further $2.7 billion to 286 organisations “that have been historically underfunded and overlooked”, including local arts groups and institutions, including the Motown Museum, and groups working in education. In a post on Medium, she wrote: “I want to de-emphasize privileged voices and cede focus to others, yet I know some media stories will focus on wealth. The headline I would wish for this post is ‘286 Teams Empowering Voices the World Needs to Hear’.

“People struggling against inequities deserve center stage in stories about change they are creating. This is equally – perhaps especially – true when their work is funded by wealth. Any wealth is a product of a collective effort that included them. The social structures that inflate wealth present obstacles to them. And despite those obstacles, they are providing solutions that benefit us all.” She said she was “attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change.”

Most recently in March 2022, she donated $436m for US affordable housing via Habitat for Humanity International and 84 of its US affiliates, making it her largest publicly disclosed donation.

MacKenzie Scott has tied the knot with science teacher Dan Jewett

It’s all a clear statement of intent from the publicity-shy novelist who kept a low profile during her 25-year marriage to the tech mogul. MacKenzie Scott (her surname taken from her grandfather) is emerging from the ashes of her high-profile marriage as a class act — all while her ex-husband lives out what appears to be a very public mid-life crisis, embroiled in an embarrassing legal scandal involving leaked intimate photos, and whose record of charitable giving, despite his unimaginable wealth, has drawn criticism.

During the record-breaking division of Jeff and MacKenzie’s $137 billion fortune in 2019, the $38 billion she received was described as a “payout”. But this sells her role in the Amazon origin story short— she was no trophy wife. Raised in San Francisco, the daughter of a financial planner and housewife, she met Jeff in 1992 when she was a 23-year-old Princeton graduate applying for a job at New York hedge fund DE Shaw.

She had ambitions to be a novelist — her Princeton tutor Toni Morrison would later call her “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes” — but applied for the research associate job to pay the bills. Bezos turned out to be her interviewer.

Working in the office next door to him, she says she fell in love with his laugh. After a few months of dating they were married. “I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot,” Bezos told Vogue in 2013. “But I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her.”

As the legend goes, the Amazon business plan was hashed out by Bezos on a road trip to Seattle in 1994 in the couple’s Chevy Blazer, him crunching the numbers as MacKenzie drove.

The first Amazon office was run out of their Seattle garage. She was the company’s original accountant and helped coin the name Amazon — the initial name, Cadabra, was scrapped when a lawyer misheard it as cadaver. In 2013, when Brad Stone’s book on the company The Everything Store, was released, MacKenzie wrote a scathing one-star review of it on Amazon, disputing many of his claims about the company’s early days. “I was there when he wrote the business plan,” she wrote.”

As the company grew, MacKenzie’s writing ambitions took a back seat to the raising of their four children, three sons and a daughter adopted from China. She published two novels, The Testing of Luther Albright (2005) and Traps (2013), working from a rented apartment near the couple’s home in the quiet suburb of Medina, Seattle, before collecting the children from school in a Honda minivan.

Despite being married to the world’s richest man, as the introvert of the two she was reluctant to embrace the limelight, though she did walk the red carpet on a handful of occasions. She joined Bezos as a co-host of the Met Gala in 2012 where she wore a gown by Juan Carlos Obando. At one of their last public appearances as a couple, the 2018 Vanity Fair Oscars after-party, MacKenzie gave the stars around her a run for their money in a plunging scarlet dress.

In January 2019 the couple announced their divorce in a statement: “After a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.”

But the peaceful nature of their split was shattered when the National Enquirer released an 11-page story claiming that Bezos had been having an affair with news anchor turned helicopter pilot Lauren Sanchez, publishing a series of leaked text messages between the pair.

Sanchez, who had split from her husband in the autumn of 2018, had reportedly become close to Bezos after working with him on his private space company Blue Origin.

Bezos hit back the following month in a blog post — “No thank you, Mr Pecker”. He accused National Enquirer owner David Pecker of extorting him by threatening to publish compromising pictures of the tech mogul if investigators who were hired by Bezos, to find out if the story about his affair with Sanchez was politically motivated, did not back off. (Bezos owns The Washington Post, which had written disparaging articles about Donald Trump, while Pecker is a Trump ally)

But, in a sensational twist, a report later claimed it had been Sanchez herself who passed the texts to her brother Michael, who sold them to the Enquirer. Michael later (unsuccessfully) sued Bezos for defamation over the nude photo claims.

Amid all this drama, Bezos’s understated ex-wife has kept a dignified silence. However, her one public statement in the May following the divorce — announcing her decision to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge — was viewed by some as a swipe at Bezos, whose charitable giving (or lack thereof) has attracted criticism.

The Bill Gates and Warren Buffett initiative invites the world’s richest to commit to giving at least half their wealth away before their deaths. Of the five richest people in America, Bezos is the only one who hasn’t signed the pledge. Although he pledged $10 billion in February 2020 to tackle climate change with his Bezos Earth Fund, his other charitable efforts have come under fire. An Amazon Relief fund announced the following March to support delivery drivers and Amazon partners during lockdown was slammed for its apparent call on the public to top-up his workers’ low pay.

And in any case, his philanthropic efforts have been drowned by reports of the indecent scale of his wealth — in a single day during last July he is said to have made up to $13 billion.

MacKenzie, meanwhile, previously revealed that of her first $1.7 billion in donations— $568m had gone to racial equality groups, $399m went to help economic mobility and $133m to gender equality. “There’s no question in my mind that anyone’s personal wealth is the product of a collective effort, and of social structures which present opportunities to some, and obstacles to countless others,” she wrote at the time.

In February 2021 Bezos announced he was stepping down as CEO of Amazon and would become the company’s executive chairman. Could this be an opportunity to step up his philanthropy? We’ll just have to watch this space.

Lauren Wendy Sanchez is an Emmy Award-winning American news anchor and the girlfriend of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

• DNA Web Team
 
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• Jun 18, 2021, 01:06 PM IST

Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos, the world's richest person, and his wife MacKenzie Bezos divorced after 25 years of marriage in 2019. According to the National Enquirer report, Jeff Bezos' affair with former Fox LA TV anchor Lauren Sanchez, the wife of Hollywood talent agent Patrick Whitesell, was the reason behind his divorce. 

Let us know more about Lauren Sanchez:

1. Emmy Award-winning American news anchor

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Lauren Wendy Sanchez is an Emmy Award-winning American news anchor and the girlfriend of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

2. When did Jeff Bezos start dating Lauren Sanchez?

2/5

Lauren and Jeff Bezos are thought to have been having a fling since January 2018 and a photo emerged from as far back as April 2018 of them enjoying a meal together.

3. Jeff Bezos & Lauren Sanchez's Taj Mahal visit

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In January 2020, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos did all things touristy as he visited the iconic Taj Mahal in Agra, with his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez during his India visit.

4. Jeff Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie Scott

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MacKenzie Scott married Jeff in 1993, a year before he started Amazon from his garage in Seattle. She divorced Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019.

5. Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott's donation

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Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has since remarried, tying the knot with Dan Jewett, a high school science teacher from Washington. Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie gave away $2.7 billion to a variety of charities, as per her blog on Tuesday (June 15). Her massive donation has brought her total donations since her fist in July 2020 to $8.5 billion. The organisations that received her donations include GiveIndia, Goonj, Antara Foundation and 283 more. This is her first time announcing donations since she married Dan Jewett.  All photos from social media