Jeff Bezos was 55 when his divorce left MacKenzie $36B in Amazon stock — she gave him 75% of their shares plus her votes

Scott posted the same day.

“Grateful to have finished the process of dissolving my marriage with Jeff with support from each other,” she wrote on X. “Looking forward to [the] next phase as co-parents and friends.”

But there’s no question that Bezos walked away with more equity. In the same post, Scott says she handed over all her interest in both the Washington Post and Blue Origin to Bezos.

She also allowed Bezos to take 75% of their joint Amazon stock, leaving her with just a four percent stake in the company compared to Bezos’ 12%. As part of the deal, she also agreed to act as a proxy voter for Bezos, meaning she no longer had any voting rights on the stock she owned.

Here’s some background on the deal — as well as how gender can impact divorce proceedings.

Washington’s laws value equality between divorcing partners

Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott lived in Seattle, Washington while they were married. Washington is a community property state, meaning that anything that a couple gains after marriage is a community good that belongs to both parties.

Bezos started Amazon in 1994, just one year after he and Scott were married. In fact, Bezos himself has talked about how important Scott was to his success with the company.

“MacKenzie, you know, she had married this stable guy working on Wall Street, and a year after we got married, I went to her and said I wanted to quit my job, move across the country, and start this internet bookstore,” Bezos told Business Insider in 2018. “Even before she could say, ‘What’s the internet?’ she said, ‘Great — let’s go!’”

His stock in Amazon is considered community property by Washington. Since Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and bought the Washington Post in 2013, they also qualify.

During divorce proceedings, Washington state judges will attempt to make a “just and equitable distribution” of the divorcing couple’s community property. This could mean splitting the property equally between the two, but it doesn’t have to; judges are allowed to give one person 55% of the community property and another 45%, for instance.

Even if the judge decides to split community property evenly, that doesn’t mean that every individual piece of community property will be split in half. If it did, a divorcing couple would have to sell their home to split it 50-50.

Instead, judges will try to balance the value of goods overall. For example, a judge might give one person a $500,000 house, the other a $100,000 boat, and use jointly-owned savings and stocks to balance the difference.

There’s a lot we don’t know about Bezos’ and Scott’s agreement. For example, she could have kept the majority of the real estate the couple owned together. Or, while we know the couple didn’t have a prenuptial agreement, they could have entered into a postnuptial one once Amazon took off.

On average, women face worse financial outcomes after divorce than men

Whether Scott got an equal share or not, she’s not struggling for money. Her stake in Amazon was worth around $36 billion at the time, enough to make her the third wealthiest woman in the world at one point. (After the divorce, Jeff Bezos was able to maintain his status as the wealthiest person in the world, with no qualifiers, until 2021.)