MacKenzie Bezos may be giving her estranged husband, Jeff Bezos, 75% of their jointly held Amazon AMZN, +0.78% stock and her entire interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin under their divorce settlement released on Thursday — but she’s holding on to enough assets to make her one of the richest women in the world.
In fact, the 4% overall Amazon ownership stake that she’s keeping is worth about $36.5 billion, which makes her the fourth wealthiest woman in the world on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index . L’Oreal LRLCY, -0.65% heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers holds the title as world’s richest woman, with a net worth, by Bloomberg’s accounting, of $53.7 billion. Walmart WMT, +0.75% heiress Alice Walton places second with a $44.2 billion fortune, while candy company Mars Inc.’s co-owner Jacqueline Badger Mars is in third with $37 billion.
(MacKenzie Bezos, 48, is the third richest woman on the Forbes wealthiest list , however, which gives a lower estimate of Mars’s net worth.)
And Bezos’s entry into this elite club is noteworthy because there are so few female billionaires as compared with the number of men who have hit the seven-figure mark. (Indeed, the “random fact” included on her Bloomberg Billionaires Index profile takes note of her being “recognized as one of the world’s richest people following her divorce.”) Forbes reported last month that, among the 2,153 billionaires in the world, just 244 were women — and only about one in four of them was self-made, having built a company or established a fortune on her own, rather than inheriting some or all of it.
A recent reported published in American Sociological Review noted that households “rarely” reach “1%” status — defined as $845,000 in annual household income — through a woman’s pay alone. The study found that women’s income alone qualifies them for 1% status in just 5% of elite households, and a woman’s income helps push a house into 1% status in just 15% of households.
“Although self-employment and higher education increase the likelihood that women will personally earn sufficient income for 1% status, marrying a man with good income prospects is still a woman’s primary route to the 1% due to labor-market inequalities,” the study co-author Jill Yavorsky told MarketWatch at the time.
Part of the problem is the pervasive gender pay gap, which effectively can cost women up to $500,000 in lost income over the course of their careers. There are also few women in the C-suite; the slim number of female CEOs at Fortune 500 actually dropped 25% between 2017 and 2018 , and women make up just under 5% of all CEOs.
Some behavioral economists and wealth experts theorize that women are more risk-averse than men, which could be discouraging many from starting their own businesses. And those who take the leap struggle to get funded. Venture capitalists — who tend to be white males — also tend to give most of their money to white male entrepreneurs . But working women also find themselves penalized for starting families or becoming caregivers in a way that men are not . While men may enjoy a “daddy bonus,” women who become moms see their careers interrupted to care for their kids, and become less likely to be hired for jobs or paid as much as their colleagues.
Bezos, who studied creative writing under Toni Morrison at Princeton, met her husband while working as an administrator at the New York hedge fund D. E. Shaw in the early 1990s, marrying shortly afterward. She has been credited as Amazon’s first accountant who was involved in growing Amazon from its humble beginnings as an online bookseller to the e-commerce giant that become the second American company to be valued at more than $1 trillion. She has written two novels that the New York Times said enjoyed “modest” sales of a few thousand copies.
And it should be noted that she’s sitting on more than just her Amazon stock. The Bezoses own at least six properties across the U.S. , including a Medina, Wash. mansion bought for $10 million in 1998. And in Washington state, divorcing parties don’t need to file property settlement agreements with the court , so the public may never know how much more she pockets from the real-estate holdings, or how her future endeavors could add to her wealth. As she noted on Twitter on Thursday, she is “excited about my own plans.”
pic.twitter.com/OJWn3OOLS6
— MacKenzie Bezos (@mackenziebezos) April 4, 2019
