Josephine of Jeff’s Heart
Action II.
When talking about Jeff and Bonapart previously, we didn’t touch the topic of their surroundings, which was an essential part of their life and one of the key points of their success. That is why today we’ll talk about the retinue that made the king, so to speak.
There were and there are always important persons in every chapter of mankind’s history who turn the world upside down either by their courage and strategic mind, or by their devotion to people, by their brilliant ideas pushing the world forward, or by their hard-working patience. Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates — all of them are the quintessence of that very humanity.
Surprisingly, they wouldn’t have reached the top if they had been on their own. There is always someone by their side who supports and motivates, gives orders, and helps to overcome the sky limits. As marshals by the side of Napoleon and Josephine in his heart — helped him to pave the way to Europe, so ‘comrades’ of Jeff Bezos were covering his back and helped him to blaze a trail into the online retail business.
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As of today, Amazon heads up more than a million employees. The coronavirus thing and lockdown following afterwards pushed us to stay at home 24/7 while ordering all the provisions and entertainments online. Amazon, as it turns out, has become THE supplier of all the necessities into homes of millions. To handle the surge in online shopping, Amazon added 400,000 jobs this year.
A tremendous growth indeed, and I believe that’s quite far from the limit. But who was that very first employee in Amazon, the assistant, and Jeff’s ‘partner in crime’? The world didn’t know much about her, about the one who was always by his side (by mid-2019, actually) from day 1 — Scott MacKenzie Bezos, meet Jeff’s wife (ex-wife actually) ladies and gentlemen. Let’s zoom in on her life to get an idea of how it started.
If you want to read the first part of the story about the Great Amazon Revolution, follow this link.
First steps in her life
Currently a novelist, billionaire, and venture philanthropist—she was born in 1970 in a wealthy family of Holiday and Jason Baker Tuttle in San Francisco.
For High School, Scott attended Hotchkiss, an elite Connecticut boarding school with a freshwater lake on its territory. “The daughter of a father who was a financial planner and a mother who cheerfully stayed home to cook meals and decorate the house,” (1) she had to face the harsh reality when her family’s financial security crumbled.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had barred her father in the late 80s after allegedly squandering his clients’ money with his ‘lavish spending’. After filing personal bankruptcy in 1987, her family and Scott returned to Palm Beach, where her father was from.
After applying to Princeton, MacKenzie was breaking her back on multiple jobs to pay her way through. After graduating, she moved to New York and started working in D.E. Shaw, a hedge fund.
Happily married
Meeting each other at D.E. Shaw, Scott and Jeff got engaged three months after and got married in 1993. Jeff wanted to drop in the online business and pitched this idea to Scott.
“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,” Bezos mentioned in a speech in 2010.
They quit D.E. Shaw, and in 1994, hopped into the car — MacKenzie at the wheel, with Jeff on the passenger’s seat — a business plan for an online bookstore was born there, and their internal compass showed them a specific destination. They drove to Seattle.
A garage first, and a rundown office in the industrial section of Seattle a bit later, Scott and Jeff were as busy as bees working on Cadabra Amazon. MacKenzie was operating as the company’s bookkeeper and administrator to fix the paycheck problems of employees, while Jeff was obsessed with numbers and fast-and-furious business growth.
Around the 2000s, when the business wasn’t just about selling books, a lot of bookish employees which made up the majority of the stuff at that time quit and so did MacKenzie. Jonathan Kochmer, a person who joined the company in 1996 recalls that she was just gone one day, and neither he nor other employees could pinpoint when exactly she left.
Life after Amazon
Dreams have to come true because they fill up our lives with a sense of meaning. The dream of MacKenzie Bezos was to become a novelist. Since the age of 6, she was all into books, writing quite a lot. When working in Amazon, she was quietly taking a night course at the University of Washington on fiction writing, then a writing workshop, working on a draft of what would become her first novel.
In 2005 MacKenzie Bezos published her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright. Garnered mediocre reviews, the book sold tepidly, at fewer than 2,000 copies according to NPD BookScan.
Life was running its course, calm and vivid — 4 kids, 2 books, 25 years of marriage, with Amazon’s total asset of US$225.248 billion — by January 2019, when headers of numerous newspapers and magazines burst out with the news about the happy Bezos family divorce.
They settled their divorce quickly and quietly and she walked away with $38 billion which is the highest divorce settlement in history.
Since then, she has been considered as one of the richest women in the world but kept a low profile except for donating $1.7 billion of her wealth to various charities in the form of individual grants.
Bottom line
There were many talks and hot discussions about her playing the part in the founding and success of Amazon. What we know is that she helped to create Amazon’s first business plan, and served as the company’s first accountant.
Although quiet and bookish, she publicly supported Amazon and her husband, raised four kids, and was always there when needed. Some will say that’s nothing, but we truly believe that a strong home front is of the utmost importance and gives a chance to look forward right on the enemy’s line.
P.S. We aren't implying anything, but Napoleon also divorced Josephine in its time when he was riding the biggest wave of his popularity and prosperity. Just a coincidence, perhaps.
