If there's one thing everybody knows about Jeff Bezos, it's that he's obscenely rich.
The Amazon founder, who's turning 61 on Jan. 12, has the kind of money that's too mind-boggling to exist in physical dollars and cents. His estimated $176.6 billion fortune is currently enough to make him the second-richest man in the world, according to Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires List, after Elon Musk.
And even if the name Bezos means nothing to you, it's likely you have contributed to his eye-popping wealth as a consumer of the online retail behemoth that's as close to an instant answer to your prayers you're likely to get (especially if you were praying for shoes, dish soap and pet food to appear all at once, and you asked a woman named Alexa, who lives in a little box in your house, to make it happen).
But while Bezos, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon on July 5, 2021, is a legend in the online commerce and disrupter worlds—as well as a political donor and philanthropist, Hollywood mover-and-shaker, and, since 2013, the owner of the Washington Post—he never was your friendly neighborhood billionaire like Warren Buffett, the face of eradicating malaria like Bill Gates or an enigmatic man in black holding the future in the palm of his hand, like the late Steve Jobs.
In fact, not a lot of people outside the business world were paying all that much attention to Bezos until his love life exploded all over the tabloids in the most relatable (for celebrities, that is) of ways.
In January 2019, Bezos and his wife of 25 years, author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, announced that they were divorcing. In addition to four children, they shared an estimated 400,000 acres of property, the aforementioned billions, and, according to TMZ, no prenuptial agreement. (If that sounds surprising, Bill and Melinda Gates didn't have one either, a prenup not the only way to parse out a massive amount of assets.)
In any case, the split—according to the exes—was amicable.
"If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again," Bezos tweeted out in the rarest of comments about his personal life. "We've had such a great life together as a married couple, and we also see wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures. Though the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain friends."
Scott also, incidentally, became one of the richest people in the world once her piece of the fortune was finalized.
What made the whole thing spicier at the time was that Bezos already had a girlfriend, veteran TV personality and former Good Day LA co-host Lauren Sánchez—who was still technically married to, but separated from, Patrick Whitesell, the co-CEO of mega-agency William Morris Endeavor and father of two of her three children.
Bezos and Sánchez have been together ever since and got engaged in May 2023, but their coupling was painted in a scandalous light at first, prompting Bezos to take action.
It was reported that Whitesell was blindsided by his wife's relationship with Bezos, whose alleged sexy text exchanges with Sánchez were leaked for public consumption.
An attorney for Bezos told the National Enquirer, which first published the texts, that it was "widely known" that his client and Scott were "long separated." A source also told Page Six that Scott knew about her ex's new relationship, and that Sánchez was with Bezos at the 2019 Golden Globes because they were openly dating.
Bezos, Sánchez and Whitesell were all spotted chatting at Amazon's Golden Globes after-party that night, according to People.
Bezos, however, went a step further and took to Medium to accuse the Enquirer of attempted extortion, alleging the publication threatened to publish intimate photos if he didn't make a favorable public statement about the tabloid.
"Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there's a much more important matter involved here," he wrote. "If in my position I can't stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?"
The Enquirer stood by its reporting on Bezos and maintained it had acted lawfully.
But the Medium post really was an uncharacteristic bit of public pushback on one of the countless narratives that has circulated about Bezos since he and Scott launched Amazon out of the garage of their Seattle rental home in 1994.
Bezos was a man who had "proved quite indifferent to the opinion of others...an avid problem solver, a man who has a chess grandmaster's view of the competitive landscape," Brad Stone wrote in his 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
He was a congenial and outgoing guy with a famously big laugh ("like a cross between a mating elephant seal and a power tool," Stone wrote), but prone to the same mercurial behavior associated with Jobs, friendly one minute and liable to cut a person down to size the next.
The name Amazon, as in the world's largest river, reflected Bezos' mighty ambition—and it purposely started with "A" so it would be near the top of any alphabetical company listing.
"People say that your life races before your eyes," Bezos told Fast Company in 2004, a year after he emerged from a helicopter crash with only a few cuts on his head. "This particular accident happened slowly enough that we had a few seconds to contemplate it."
Bezos continued, laughing heartily, "I have to say, nothing extremely profound flashed through my head in those few seconds. My main thought was, This is such a silly way to die. It wasn't life-changing in any major way. I've learned a fairly tactical lesson from it, I'm afraid. The biggest takeaway is: Avoid helicopters whenever possible! They're not as reliable as fixed-wing aircraft."
Sánchez, however, is a helicopter pilot who has her own aerial production company, Black Ops Aviation, and you best believe Bezos' $500 million superyacht has a helipad.
"I've also learned how to fly the helicopter," Bezos told CNN in November 2022. "And she's a horrible backseat pilot. She's terrible!"
Vowing to spend more time looking out the window, Sanchez acknowledged with a laugh, "I'm like, 'No, no. Pull up. Okay. Okay, Slow down.' But he's very good."
Which certainly isn't a surprise, considering Bezos has never been one to tackle a challenge with anything less than...everything.
"Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?" Bezos inquired in the commencement speech he gave for Princeton's Class of 2010. "Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?"
And it all started with a bunch of books.
Bezos and Scott first met in New York while working at a Wall Street hedge fund. Bezos, tuned in to the fact that Internet commerce was the wave of the future, studied his options and decided he wanted to start an online bookstore. He took the idea to his own boss, who, according to Tom Robinson's Jeff Bezos: Amazon.com Architect, said it was a good idea, but a better idea for someone who didn't already work full-time.
When he got the idea for what would become Amazon (and was almost called Relentless.com, but friends deemed that scary), Bezos came up with what he called a "regret-minimization framework" to help him work out the pros and cons of leaving his successful career in finance. "When you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by small stuff," he later said, per Stone.
"I have no business sense whatsoever," Scott told Vogue in 2013, "but I saw how excited he was."
"I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year," Bezos recounted in the 2010 Princeton commencement address. "I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't sure what would happen after that."
So in the summer of 1994, the couple flew to Texas, where his parents lived. They told the movers to just start driving west and they would follow up with an exact destination—which, at the moment, they weren't sure of yet.
Jacklyn and Miguel "Mike" Bezos loaned the couple the SUV in which Scott drove them to Seattle, while Bezos worked on his laptop. They didn't have any personal ties to the city, but a friend had recommended it—and at the time online retailers didn't have to collect sales tax in states where they didn't have a physical presence. Washington was small and he wanted the rest of his customers around the country to avoid paying sales tax.
Jackie was 17 when Bezos was born in Albuquerque; he was 1 when Jackie divorced his biological father, Ted Jorgenson. Mike, who left Cuba for the U.S. when he was 15, met Jackie while working the night shift at Bank of New Mexico while attending the University of Albuquerque. They married when Jeff was 4 and Mike adopted him. Bezos has said that Mike is the only father he's ever known. The family moved around for Mike's work, from Albuquerque, to Houston and then to Miami, where Bezos enrolled in a science program at University of Florida while still in high school.
He was a supremely talented student in math and science, a Star Trek fan who loved to tinker with stuff in the garage, senior class president and valedictorian. He went on to major in electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton.
In 1995, Jackie and Mike invested $245,573 in their son's start-up, Amazon.com.
"I want you to know how risky this is," Jeff told them, according to remarks Mike Bezos gave in 2015 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, "because I want to come home at dinner for Thanksgiving and I don't want you to be mad at me."
According to Bloomberg in 2018, their share of the company was worth about $30 billion—a 12 million percent return. Bezos' younger siblings, Mark Bezos and Christina Bezos, also purchased 30,000 shares apiece for $10,000 in 1996 and in 2018 each holding was valued at as much as $640 million.
"We were fortunate enough that we have lived overseas [they had just spent three years in Bogotá, Colombia] and we have saved a few pennies so we were able to be an angel investor," Mike, a former engineer at Exxon, said. "The rest is history."
Back in 1990, Bezos joined investment firm D.E. Shaw & Company and was a senior vice president within two years. According to The Everything Store, as a single guy he took ballroom dancing lessons, hoping to increase the probability of meeting "n+ women." He made a flow chart.
"The number one criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third-world prison," Bezos later said, according to Richard Brandt's 2011 book One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com. "What I really wanted was someone resourceful. But nobody knows what you mean when you say, 'I'm looking for a resourceful woman'...Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful."
Eventually he met MacKenzie Scott (née Tuttle), a research associate and fellow Princeton grad from San Francisco who worked in the office right next to his. Sensing a connection as they got to know each other and with Bezos reluctant to make a move as the supervisor of her team, Scott approached him.
"My office was next door to his, and all day I listened to that fabulous laugh," Scott, an English major who had done research for Toni Morrison while the Nobel Prize winner was writing Jazz, told Vogue. "How could you not fall in love with that laugh?"
They got engaged three months after their first lunch date, then married in 1993 at the Breakers in West Palm Beach, Fla., where the reception included an adult-size play area with water balloons.
"I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot," Bezos told Vogue, "but I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her, so I knew exactly what her SATs were." (He wouldn't reveal her score.)
Once in Seattle, they rented a house for $890 a month in the suburb of Bellevue; set up some tables, chairs and computers in their garage, starting with $25,000 of their own money; and Amazon.com was registered on Feb. 9, 1995, with Bezos' parents being his primary investors at the time.
Scott was the company's first bookkeeper, secretary and office manager. The couple's golden retriever, Kamala (named after a creature from Star Trek: The Next Generation) would hang out in the garage. Amazon's small staff would sometimes go to a nearby Barnes & Noble for coffee and meetings.
The site went live on July 16, 1995.
By that September, Amazon.com was selling $20,000 in books a week. That first year, the company had a net loss of $303,000. They went public in 1997 and raised $54 million in capital; moved into new headquarters in a former hospital in 1998; and Bezos was named TIME magazine's Person of the Year in 1999. The article described him as "pathologically happy and infectiously enthusiastic."
Amazon's death knell was sounded many a time in the 1990s, and the company would not report a quarterly profit, of $5 million, until the fourth quarter of 2001—which saw $2 billion in sales for the year. They turned a profit in 2003. In 2004, Fast Company reported that they were on track for $7 billion in sales and $400 million in net earnings.
In the third quarter of 2023, Amazon reported $143.1 billion in sales and $9.9 billion in net income.
"The thing about inventing is you have to be both stubborn and flexible, more or less simultaneously," Bezos told Fast Company. "Of course, the hard part is figuring out when to be which."
Amazon's infamously intense, overtime-expected, high-turnover workplace culture has been well-documented, often not flatteringly.
Bezos, whose inspiration included the visionaries Thomas Edison and Walt Disney, expected his employees to abide by 14 core leadership principles, according to Stone: customer obsession; ownership; invent and simplify; "are right, a lot" (if you know what you're doing, you're probably right); learn and be curious; hire and develop the best; insist on the highest standards; think big; bias for action (go for it, don't overthink); frugality; earn trust; dive deep; have backbone, disagree and commit; and deliver results.
Employees didn't give Power Point presentations, Stone wrote, but rather had to prepare six-page treatises laying out their ideas. The approach fostered critical thinking, according to the boss.
"It's not easy to work here...but we are working to build something important, something that matters to our customers, something that we can all tell our grandchildren about," Bezos wrote in a 1997 letter to shareholders.
As he told the Princeton class of 2010, "When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless? Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder? Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?"
Eric Schmidt, then executive chairman of Google (and an Amazon Prime member), told Stone, "To me Amazon is a story of a brilliant founder who personally drove the vision. There are almost no better examples...It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. But Jeff was very garrulous, very smart. He's a classic technical founder of a business, who understands every detail and cares about it more than anyone."
Incidentally, Scott left a one-star review of The Everything Store on Amazon.com under the subject line, "I wanted to like this book," and called it a "lopsided and misleading portrait of the people and culture at Amazon."
Stone, in response, told the New York Times, that Bezos had "approved many interviews with current Amazon executives and former Amazon executives" and had declined interview requests for himself. "Most of the readers and reviewers have been inspired by Amazon's story," the author said. "To me, it's not an unflattering account."
During their marriage, Bezos and Scott acquired a real estate portfolio that included a gated 5.3-acre compound in the Seattle suburb of Medina, reachable via the longest floating bridge in the world; the South Texas ranch where Bezos used to spend summers with his grandparents, near where his aeronautics and space-exploration company Blue Origin is also based; a $24 million home in Beverly Hills; four condos in a building on Manhattan's Upper West Side; and a residence in Washington D.C. that broke a record for Beltway home prices when Bezos bought the former Textile Museum in 2016 for $23 million.
He and Scott share three sons and a daughter, whose privacy has always been a top priority (eldest son Preston, which is also Bezos' middle name, was born in 2000 and is the only one whose name is public). But Bezos shared some parenting insight at the Summit LA 17 event while being interviewed by his brother Mark.
"How do you help your children, what's the right thing?" Bezos mused. "My wife has a great saying—we let our kids use, even now they're 17 through 12, but even when they were 4, we would let them use sharp knives. By the time they were, I don't know, maybe 7 or 8, we would let them use certain power tools and my wife, much to her credit, she has this great saying, 'I would much rather have a kid with 9 fingers than a resourceless kid.' Which, I just think, is a fantastic attitude about life."
Scott is also the author of two novels, 2005's The Testing of Luther Albright and 2013's Traps. "Jeff is my best reader," she told Vogue, noting that her husband would block out a big chunk of time and read a manuscript in one sitting, leaving her detailed notes.
Acknowledging how unusual her lot in life had become, Scott said, "I am definitely a lottery winner of a certain kind and it makes my life wonderful in many ways, but that's not the lottery I feel defined by. The fact that I got wonderful parents who believed in education and never doubted I could be a writer, the fact that I have a spouse I love, those are the things that define me."
"Jeff is the opposite of me," she also said. "He likes to meet people. He's a very social guy. Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking. The brevity of conversations, the number of them—it's not my sweet spot."
Bezos said of Scott, "Writing makes her really happy." On days when she would get up early to write, "by the time I come down, she will be literally dancing in the kitchen, which the kids and I love."
Another occupation, when you have this kind of wealth, is figuring out where your money is going to do the most good and, according to Forbes, Bezos has given away roughly $3 billion, including a recent $118 million pledge to groups that aid families experiencing homelessness.
Scott, who married science teacher Dan Jewett in 2021 but filed for divorce in September 2022 (the split was finalized in January 2023), has reportedly given away more than $19.2 billion since she and Bezos went their separate ways in 2019.
And just as Bezos and Scott teamed up to make numerous massive pledges during their time together, he's now making those decisions with Sánchez.
"It's the greatest experience I've ever had," Sánchez said of partnering with her now-fiancé on business and philanthropic endeavors. She told WSJ. Magazine in January 2023, "I've always had a career very separate from my partner. We love to be together and we love to work together. He's helping me with the book. He's getting his pilot's license. We fly together. We work out together. We're together all the time."
The 54-year-old said she also planned to lead an all-female mission to space on a Blue Origin rocket in early 2024.
Bezos had just told her, "'Fly fast; take chances,'" Sánchez shared. "That's his motto. He's very encouraging and excited, and he's thrilled we're putting this group together."
And while she's had to tamp down her tendency to share a lot—"I want to tell everyone everything"—she doesn't consider it a sacrifice.
"I learned how to not give the location of where I'm at," explained Sánchez, who shares a son with retired NFL star Tony Gonzalez and a daughter and son with Whitesell. "I can't Instagram things that I normally would have before. I have to be more private, a little more controlled, and that's fine."
But if it's a Sunday morning at home, Bezos is making her pancakes.
"He wakes up early," Sánchez said. "He gets the Betty Crocker cookbook out every time, and I'm like, 'OK, you're the smartest man in the world; why don't you have this memorized yet?' But he opens it up every time: Exact portions make the best pancakes in the world."
Sounds like an approach a certain billionaire might take. But Bezos is just trying to show his appreciation with a perfect flour-milk-egg ratio.
"Lauren is the most generous, most big-hearted person that you would ever meet," he told CNN in November 2022. "So, she is an inspiration in that way. She never misses a birthday. The network of people that she gives birthday presents to is gigantic. And that's just a small example."
But they also seem to complement each other perfectly.
"We're really great teammates, and we also have a lot of fun together," Sánchez said. "And we love each other...We always look at each other and we're the team." Added Bezos, "It's easy. We bring each other energy, we respect each other. So, it's fun to work together."
Incidentally, he concluded his address to the Princeton grads in 2010 by reiterating how he often thinks about how he wants to feel about his life when looking back on it from further down the road one day.
"I will hazard a prediction," Bezos said. "When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story."
And while he found love again with Sanchez, first came the end of his long marriage, just like these stars who split up after decades together:
The NFL star and the supermodel touched down in divorce court after 13 years of marriage, confirming Oct. 28, 2022, on their respective social media platforms that they had finalized the terms of their split.
"We arrived at this decision amicably and with gratitude for the time we spent together," Tom, who shares kids Benjamin and Vivian with Bündchen, wrote in his Instagram Story message. "We are blessed with beautiful and wonderful children who will continue to be the center of our world in every way. We will continue to work together as parents to always ensure they receive the love and attention they deserve."
The Super Bowl MVP—who is also dad to son Jack from his previous relationship with Bridget Moynahan—noted that he and Gisele didn't take their decision lightly.
"Doing so is, of course, painful and difficult, like it is for many people who go through the same thing every day around the world," he continued. "However we wish only the best for each other as we pursue whatever new chapters in our lives that are yet to be written."
Tish and Billy Ray Cyrus
Parents to daughters Miley and Noah as well as son Braison (plus he adopted her daughter Brandi and son Trace and fathered son Christopher in a previous relationship) the couple tied the knot in 1993.
The country singer filed for divorce in 2010, saying in a statement at the time that they were "trying to work through some personal matters." Mission accomplished, at least temporarily, because Billy Ray withdrew his petition in March 2011. However, he refiled in June 2013, and she counter-filed. And yet, they stayed together again, Tish crediting couples therapy for bringing them closer.
But they would later find themselves drifting apart. Though Tish filed for divorce a third time in April 2022, her petition stated that she and her husband of 29 years had actually been living apart since February 2020.
"It is after 30 years, five amazing children and a lifetime of memories, we have decided to go our separate ways—not with sadness, but with love in our hearts," the exes told People in a joint statement. "We have grown up together, raised a family we can be so proud of, and it is now time to create our own paths."
Later that year, Billy Ray got engaged to Firerose, whom he wed in October 2023. But after less than a year of marriage, the "Old Town Road" artist filed for divorce in June 2024. Following a contentious split, they settled their divorce two months later.
Meanwhile, Tish accepted Prison Break star Dominic Purcell's proposal in 2023 and married him that year.
The parents of three and co-founders of the internationally renowned Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation revealed in May 2021 they were splitting up after 27 years of marriage. A Washington judge finalized their divorce just three months later, a ready-to-roll separation contract making the division of their estimated $130 billion fortune less onerous.
Both recently divorced, Sean from Madonna and Robin from Dane Witherspoon, the actors fell in love making the 1990 crime drama State of Grace. They welcomed daughter Dylan in 1991 and son Hopper in 1993 and tied the knot in 1996. They purposely moved to Northern California to raise their kids away from "the bubble of celebrity," Robin would later explain to Vanity Fair, but tumult followed and, after a few false starts, they officially divorced in 2010.
"I believe we were together not only to have our beautiful children but to learn how to love...for the next time around, the right way," the House of Cards star said. "And then, what I'm looking for in people now is kindness."
At the time she was back on with ex-fiancé Ben Foster, but after that ended she moved on with Clement Giraudet, marrying him in 2018. TMZ reported in September 2022 that Robin filed for divorce, citing July 31, 2022, as their date of separation.
Sean famously dated Charlize Theron for a couple of years and then married Leila George in January 2020, but she filed for divorce in October 2021.
A power couple even before they were governor and first lady of California, the bodybuilder-turned-actor and renowned journalist announced in May 2011 that they had separated after 25 years of marriage.
A week later, Arnold came clean about fathering a son with his family's former housekeeper of more than 20 years. Joseph Baena enjoys a relationship with his dad (as well as an affinity for the weight room) and is pursuing his own career as an actor.
The Shriver-Schwarzenegger union, which produced daughters Katherine and Christina as well as sons Patrick and Christopher didn't officially end until December 2021, when The Terminator star and the author finalized their divorce.
His-and-hers prison sentences for fraud were not kind to the Real Housewives of New Jersey stars' 20-year marriage. He ended up being deported to Italy after spending three years behind bars, and they divorced in September 2020.
"I can't get mad at her," Joe told E! News of his ex a month later. "She's the mother of my four daughters and she's taking care of them right now because obviously I can't. What am I going to do, have the kids move here to a country that they don't even know the language? That would be a disaster...Thank God they're tough kids, but it's still a damn shame. At the end of the day, you know, we're doing our best."
Teresa is once again a married woman, wedding Luis Ruelas in August 2022 after they met during a chance encounter at the Jersey shore. The bride's four daughters—Gia, Gabriella, Milania and Audriana—were all in attendance.
Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins
Married for all intents and purposes, if not on paper, the Oscar winners separated in the summer of 2009 after 23 years together, having met making the rowdy 1988 baseball romance Bull Durham.
They share sons Jack and Miles plus Tim helped raise Susan's daughter Eva Amurri.
"People were coming up to me in the street and saying, 'I cried and cried when I heard,'" the Thelma & Louise star told The Telegraph in 2010 after her breakup with the director. "Well, I was sadder! I didn't think it would ever happen, either. You bring people into your life at certain times. Maybe you have a relationship to have children and you realize that it's fulfilled after that point."
Tim ended up marrying actress Gratiela Brancusi in 2017, but it wasn't widely known they'd taken that step until he filed for divorce in January 2021.
Though Robyn didn't file for divorce from the father of her seven children until April 2009, according to Reuters, their separation began just days after his explosive drunk-driving arrest in July 2006.
"Throughout our marriage and separation we have always strived to maintain the privacy and integrity of our family and will continue to do so," they said in a 2009 statement confirming the end of their union. At the time, Mel was already expecting a child, his eighth, with then-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. (He's since become a dad of nine, welcoming son Lars in 2017 with Rosalind Ross.)
"It was an unfortunate incident," the Braveheart actor said on Variety's Playback podcast in 2016, referring to his 2006 arrest and the resulting backlash over antisemitic comments he made to the officer that pulled him over. "I was loaded and angry and arrested. I was recorded illegally by an unscrupulous police officer who was never prosecuted for that crime...So, not fair. I guess as who I am, I'm not allowed to have a nervous breakdown, ever."
The TLC star's third of four sister wives—and mother of six of his 18 children—left the family's Arizona home in November 2021 after 27 years together and moved to Utah.
"I started thinking maybe this isn't working for me," Christine told People in August 2022. "And then I stopped believing in polygamy. I realized I didn't really want to live it anymore. I didn't like sharing a husband or feeling like I wasn't important."
Kody legally married first wife Meri Brown in 1990, after which sister wives Janelle Brown and Christine joined him in spiritual matrimony in 1993 and 1994, respectively. He and Meri divorced and fourth wife Robyn Brown became his legally recognized spouse in 2014.
"I want a guy who actually loves me and wants to be with me intimately," Christine, who wed David Woolley the following year, added. "I will be a monogamist from here on out."
Janelle has also since left the fold, Kody revealing in the December 2022 reunion special that they were separated. Meri followed suit soon after, with her and Kody announcing in January 2023 they decided to "permanently terminate" their spiritual marriage.
OK, so the couple that earn their first billion together don't necessarily stay together.
News of the Amazon founder and sometimes-richest-man-in-the-world's divorce from his wife of 25 years came as a shock in January 2019—though mainly because Jeff was already involved with not-yet-divorced Good Day L.A. co-host Lauren Sanchez and the National Enquirer published their romantic text messages. (Jeff, who shares four children with MacKenzie, countered that they were long-separated so the tabloid didn't have much of a scoop.)
MacKenzie, who married Seattle science teacher Dan Jewett in March 2021, received a reported $38.3 billion worth of Amazon stock in her divorce settlement, turning her into one of the world's richest people as well. She signed The Giving Pledge, a promise to give at least half of her fortune to charity, in 2019.
Dan made the vow as well after their wedding, but MacKenzie filed for divorce on Sept. 26, 2022, and it was finalized in early 2023.
Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman
Married for 30 years, the Matilda co-stars announced in 2012 that they were separating—but the parents of three never pulled the trigger on a divorce.
"We're still separated, but we see each other often, and we're still a family," Perlman told People in August. "We can do things together, we can do things separately. I'm really, really glad that Danny and I were able to navigate some rough days to be able to have this different kind of relationship. I think it's pretty rare, but we agree on so many things that it makes sense."
(Originally published Jan. 11, 2019, at 3 a.m. PT)