Jeff Bezos announces divorce from wife of 25 years

On Wednesday, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos announced that he and wife MacKenzie Bezos are getting a divorce after a trial separation. "We feel incredibly lucky to have found each other and deeply grateful for every one of the years we have been married to each other," the couple said a joint statement. "If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again." The couple, who have four children, say they plan to remain a family and "cherished friends."

Bezos is thought to be the world's wealthiest man, worth an estimated $137 billion, and Amazon just became the most valuable publicly traded company in the U.S., with a market value Wednesday of $811 billion. The terms of their divorce settlement are not public, but "if MacKenzie Bezos were to receive a quarter of her husband's estimated fortune in the divorce — $40 billion — she would be among the world's richest women," CBS News reports. "The property acquired during the marriage is common property," said Jennifer Payseno, a family lawyer at the Seattle firm McKinley Irvin. She and other divorce experts said they expected the Bezoses already reached a private, out-of-court division of their assets.

Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos met while working at a hedge fund in New York and got married six months after they started dating, The Associated Press reports. Jeff Bezos wrote up the business plan for his online bookstore while they were driving out to set up shop in Seattle.

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