After finalizing her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos lands at the No. 4 spot on the list of world’s richest women.
MacKenzie Bezos will retain 25% of the couple’s stock in Amazon, or about a 4% stake in the entire company, she announced from a newly-created Twitter account on Thursday. That stake is worth approximately $36 billion per Amazon’s current share price.
That fortune makes Bezos, a writer, the fourth-richest woman in the world, behind Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, the L’Oreal heiress with a net worth of $54 billion and Alice Walton of the Walmart family and her $44 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index. Bezos is nearly tied with the third woman on the list, Jacqueline Badger Mars of the Mars candy company family, who has a net worth of $37 billion; some estimates of Bezos’s 4% stake place that value closer to that number. (Forbes has a lower estimate for Mars’ net worth and places Bezos as the world’s third richest woman.)
“Grateful to have finished the process of dissolving my marriage with Jeff with support from each other and everyone who reached out to us in kindness, and looking forward to our next phase as co-parents and friends,” Bezos said in her statement. “Excited about my own plans. Grateful for the past as I look forward to what comes next.”
The couple first announced the end of their 25-year marriage in January, shining a spotlight on MacKenzie Bezos, who had stayed out of the limelight, amid speculation about the fate of the couple’s combined fortune. If the couple had agreed on an even split, the default under Washington state law, MacKenzie Bezos would have vaulted to first on the list of the world’s richest women. (Her combined fortune with Jeff Bezos didn’t put her on the radar of these lists before the divorce.)
Jeff Bezos will retain voting control of MacKenzie Bezos’s shares, she said in her statement. She also gave up her interests in the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos independently from Amazon, and his space exploration company Blue Origin.
Estimates of Bezos’s wealth are based on her Amazon holdings and not any other components of her net worth. Bezos is a writer who has published two novels.