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https://www.foxnews.com/us/jeff-bezos-amazon-ceo-worth-137-billion-to-divorce-wife-of-25-years
"Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie are divorcing after 25 years of marriage, the Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner has announced, potentially leading to the costliest divorce settlement in history with $137 billion at stake."
The richest man in the world, currently worth about $137 billion, according to Bloomberg, made the divorce announcement on Wednesday on his Twitter.
[...]The split could lead [to] the costliest divorce is[sic] history, even if the couple doesn’t divide the money equally. There are no reports indicating the couple has a prenuptial agreement, meaning the wealth accumulated during their marriage would have to be split evenly.
Also covered by CBC, CNN, and CNBC among other news outlets.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:04PM (6 children)
Never confuse what something is worth to you with what something is worth to someone willing to pay "~$290,000/hour every hour, for all of his 54 years of life". As AthanasiusKircher noted, someone was willing to pay that price (and still is paying!) which strongly indicates that Mr. Bezos was worth considerably more than that.
As a side note, Amazon is currently employing something like half a million people. That and cheaper trade of goods sold by Amazon have to be worth something to you.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:59PM (5 children)
Nobody is chosing to pay him that much except himself and the board - who are pretty much all in on the game. High executive compensation helps justify high board-member compensation. And all of them are theoretically working for the shareholders, which Bezos at 16% is by far the largest and most influential.
When you set your own salary, it's really hard to claim that the fact that you're getting paid that much is evidence of the value of your work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @03:20PM (1 child)
Salary... For a very long time Jeff Bezos set his salary at a very low amount and took most of his compensation in stock. Even today, his salary is small compared to most CEOs, with stock and other benefits being the majority of his compensation.
Jeff's net worth is mostly in Amazon stock, not cash.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:03PM
Salary, stock - doesn't actually make much difference - either way it's a wealth transfer (though stock provides more incentive for longer-term performance - at least long enough to be able to sell.)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 11 2019, @03:39AM (2 children)
That's sufficient.
Where is the money coming from? It's not magically created.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday January 11 2019, @04:14AM (1 child)
No, it's not magically created. It's created by the people actually doing the work to generate the wealth - his employees.
And he is able to take more of that wealth for himself than he has earned, because Amazon has far more negotiating power to abuse than any individual job applicant does.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 11 2019, @04:59AM
How many of them have started up several hundred billion dollar companies? Doing a low value job like packer is not near equivalent to creating and running a company that employs over half a million people or ships so many things for so many people.
And of course, you miss the most important people of all, the customers who bought Amazon's products.