WASHINGTON, April 4 (CGTN) -- Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, finalized the biggest divorce settlement in history on Thursday, leaving him with 75 percent of their stock in the tech giant and giving her nearly 36 billion U.S. dollars in shares.
MacKenzie Bezos said she would give all of her stake in The Washington Post and the space exploration firm Blue Origin to her husband – the world's richest man – as well as voting control of her remaining Amazon stock.
Jeff Bezos, 55, and MacKenzie, 48, a novelist, married in 1993 and have four children. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in their Seattle garage in 1994 and turned it into a colossus that dominates online retail.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Amazon, which has a market capitalization of some 890 billion U.S. dollars, said MacKenzie Bezos will control four percent of the company's outstanding common stock.
At Amazon's current share price that would be worth some 35.6 billion U.S. dollars.
According to Forbes magazine, the divorce settlement makes MacKenzie Bezos the third wealthiest woman in the world after L'Oreal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers and Walmart's Alice Walton.
Jeff Bezos, who now owns 12 percent of Amazon, remains the world's richest man and the largest shareholder in the company with an estimated fortune of 110 billion U.S. dollars, Forbes said, ahead of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett.
Bezos has largely kept his personal life private during his years steering Amazon.
But it was thrust into the spotlight with the announcement in January that he and his wife were divorcing after 25 years of marriage and the revelation by the National Enquirer that he had been having an affair with a former news anchor, Lauren Sanchez.
When the National Enquirer, controlled by President Donald Trump's ally David Pecker, threatened to release lurid, intimate pictures of Bezos and Sanchez, Bezos fought back by releasing the details of his exchanges publicly.
"Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I've decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten," Bezos wrote in a blog post.
A lawyer for the National Enquirer denied that the supermarket tabloid had tried to extort and blackmail the Amazon founder.
Trump has been a frequent critic of the Washington Post, which Bezos purchased in 2013, claiming that the newspaper is biased against him and calling it the "Amazon Washington Post".
Amazon shares closed down 0.1 percent on Thursday.
