Before Jeff Bezos built Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) into a trillion-dollar empire, he had a very specific approach to dating—one that involved a lot of blind dates. His top requirement? The woman had to be resourceful. Not just in the everyday sense, but in a “could-get-him-out-of-a-Third-World-prison” kind of way.
In a 1999 interview with Wired, Bezos admitted he let his friends set him up before he met MacKenzie Scott at D.E. Shaw, where he served as vice president. “The No. 1 criterion was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a Third World prison,” he said.
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His reasoning? “I’m not the kind of person where women say, ‘Oh, look how great he is,’ a half hour after meeting me. I’m kind of goofy,” he said.
Bezos also said in the interview, “What I really wanted was someone resourceful. But nobody knows what you mean when you say, ‘I’m looking for a resourceful woman.’
Luckily for Bezos, he didn’t need a blind date to meet MacKenzie—he just had to conduct a job interview. In 1993, she applied for a position at D.E. Shaw in New York, and Bezos was the first person to interview her. He hired her as a research associate, and her office ended up right next to his. Listening to his laugh all day, she quickly found herself drawn to him.
“My office was next door to his, and all day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,” she told Vogue in 2013. “How could you not fall in love with that laugh?”
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The couple, who share four children —three sons and a daughter— married later that year, long before Bezos became one of the world’s richest men. He joked in the same Vogue interview, “I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot, but I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her, so I knew exactly what her SATs were.”
Despite amassing a fortune together, Jeff and MacKenzie never signed a prenup. That made their 2019 divorce one of the most expensive in history. The settlement left MacKenzie with 25% of their Amazon stock—about $36 billion at the time, according to media reports. Instead of hoarding her wealth, she started giving it away at an unprecedented pace.
