Mirror
Three decades after founding Amazon in his garage, Jeff Bezos is set to step down as chief executive.
He will instead serve as executive chairman to give himself ‘time and energy’ for other ventures, with the change expected to take place in the second half of this year.
It comes two years after the 57-year-old business mogul announced his divorce from MacKenzie Scott – the woman who was by his side from the beginning.
The pair met when 23-year-old MacKenzie interviewed for a job at New York hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co in 1993.
On the panel was senior vice president of the company Jeff, who went on to offer her the job of research associate.
And it was in the corridors of the investment firm where an unlikely romance between the co-workers blossomed.
In a 2013 interview with Vogue magazine, MacKenzie spoke of her first attraction to Jeff.
She said: “My office was next door to his, and all day long, I listened to that fabulous laugh.
“How could you not fall in love with that laugh?”
Jeff himself once described her as “resourceful, smart, brainy and hot”, adding that “I had the good fortune of having seen her resume before I met her, so I knew exactly what her SATs were.”
Indeed, MacKenzie was just as much a powerhouse as her husband.
Growing up in San Francisco, she was a shy child who would often stay in her bedroom writing ‘elaborate stories’. By the age of six she had written her first book, the 142-page novel The Book Worm.
After high school, she went to Princeton University to study fiction with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tony Morrison. He described her as “one of the best students I’ve ever had”.
And it was MacKenzie who made the first move on Jeff by asking him out to lunch. Three months later they were engaged and three months after that, they got married.
A year on from their nuptials, Jeff began work on his online bookshop.
They quit their lives in New York City and moved to a one-bedroom rental in Seattle to help realise his dream.
As the company got off the ground, Jeff offered MacKenzie an accountancy role – making her one of Amazon’s first employees.
And she has rightly has always fiercely defended her role in the company’s roots.
She once fired: “I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others represented in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centres, and the door-desk filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history.”
As the company expanded, the couple bought properties in Washington, Beverley Hills, California, Texas and Manhattan, New York, but tried to keep their family life as normal as possible.
Mutual friend Danny Hillis told Vogue how MacKenzie would drive their four kids to school and then drop Jeff off at work in a 1996 Honda.
“They are such a normal, close-knit family, it’s almost abnormal,” said Danny.
And so the end of their marriage came as a shock to most, although both parties insisted they felt ‘incredibly lucky to have found each other.’
“If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again,” Jeff said in a statement.
Then just hours later reports emerged claiming he’d grown close to news anchor Lauren Sanchez, whose 12-year marriage to top Hollywood agent Patrick Whitesell had ended in autumn 2018.