Bezos wife Ksh.3.5T divorce deal can put up 109 Thika Superhighways

MacKenzie Bezos, wife to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, may walk out of her marriage with company stock worth Ksh.3.5trillion after the two agreed on divorce terms.

According to CNN, this is 4percent of the company’s outstanding common stock and is based on Amazon’s current market value.

If MacKenzie Bezos sells her shares, the buyer would have to enter into an agreement with Jeff Bezos to grant him the rights to vote those shares, the CNN report adds.

The amount is bigger than the Kenya Government budget for the 2018/9 financial year.

CS Henry Rotich tabled a Ksh.3.074trillion budget in June last year, the highest in Kenya’s history. County governments were allocated Ksh.314billion.

Looking at the Mackenzie Bezos divorce settlement, it can finance the 47 county governments for about 11 years.

It would also build the current Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) line from Nairobi to Mombasa 11 times over. The SGR was constructed at a cost of Ksh.326billion.

The Thika Superhighway was built at a cost of Ksh.32billion meaning that Bezos money could pay for 109 such roads.

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— MacKenzie Bezos (@mackenziebezos) April 4, 2019

The pair first announced plans to separate in January, ending a 25-year marriage.

The separation quickly turned into a media firestorm after the National Enquirer claimed to have evidence that Jeff Bezos was “whisking his mistress off to exotic destinations on his $65 million private jet.”

Bezos later published a tell-all blog post accusing the tabloid of trying to extort him. He included the full text of emails his representatives got from executives at AMI, the publisher of the National Enquirer.

Jeff Bezos, 55, and MacKenzie Bezos, 48, met and got married in the early 90s while working at D.E. Shaw, a New York-based hedge fund. Shortly after, they packed up and moved across the country to Seattle, where Bezos launched Amazon. They have four children.

The success of Amazon turned Bezos into the world’s richest person. His current net worth is estimated at $150 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Additional report from Francis Gachuri and CNN