Yo yo yo! Wazzup! Who's that hipster in the smoking threads hanging out with Lizzo at the Superbowl Party? Is that Jeff Bezos? What do you mean you don't know who Lizzo is? Come on. Jeff's on it. He knows. Lizzo is the hip sassy, whip-smart rapper behind such delicious,
Divorce, mega-yachts and Superbowl parties: How Amazon founder Jeff is living his #BezosLife
By Harry de Quetteville
Daily Telegraph UK·
7 mins to read
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, right and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez. Photo / AP
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Who cares if it cost US$13m ($20m) to get the house refitted, Jeff can afford it - though his divorce trimmed his wealth to a mere US$126bn (MacKenzie has to make do with about US$40bn, making her the third richest woman in the world). As for the US$16,000 ($25,000) in parking tickets that his builders racked up while decorating the place? What matter? Rules are for breaking. Rock and roll, man. Rock and roll.
Since his divorce Jeff, after all, has been having the time of his life on mega-yachts in the Balearics, at the Wimbledon final, and in that shimmering embodiment of his new romance with mistress-turned-girlfriend Sanchez, Venice. "When you get divorced you go out and drink with your mates," says Karen Krizanovich, the waspish American critic and one-time agony aunt. "You got a billion dollars, what do you do? You go out but on a much, much bigger scale."
It wasn't always this way. In 2018 Bloomberg named Bezos the richest man in history, his wealth topping US$150bn. It was the culmination of 24 years of hard work since founding the so-called "everything store", alongside MacKenzie, in 1994.
But just as he surpassed Croesus, he began an affair with the helicopter pilot wife of a Hollywood powerbroker, embarking on explorations of her eye-catching embonpoint aboard his private jet that helped end his marriage and for the first time made him a fixture of the gossip – not the business – pages. Rumours swirled further still after news last month that Bezos's phone was reportedly 'hacked' via a WhatsApp message sent by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia's personal number.
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It has all been quite the departure for a man whose life, work and reputation until then had been defined by the three Fs: family, frugality, and… fungus.
Fungus, because, as cliché would have, as a self-confessed Star Trek nerd (Bezos owns a replica of Captain Jean-Luc Picard's uniform from the series, and once wangled his way into an appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation) he had hitherto not been noted as a ladies' man. Rather, as he told Playboy back when his online business was a charming rival to bricks and mortar booksellers rather than today's titanic purveyor of global goods and the infrastructure behind much of the internet itself: "I am not the kind of person women fall in love with. I sort of grow on them, like a fungus."
As for family and frugality, well, the two values were stitched into his life even as his riches rocketed, manifest in his home in Seattle, where he and MacKenzie brought up their four children, and where he said he spent 80 per cent of his time.
Here was the billionaire who professed to do the dishes every night, and who decorated the walls of his headquarters in the same Pacific Coast city with 14 "Leadership Principles", of which number nine read: "Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention!" And yet here we are today, with a very different Jeff. A Bezos 2.0 for 2020. "Reinventing normal," as he once described his company to shareholders, "and getting customers to say 'Wow.'" Wow indeed, Jeff.
Once upon a time, through the six-page narrative pitches – no Powerpoint, please! – that his executives demand, it was purely Amazon's products and services that were buffed and polished. Now, it is Bezos himself who is undergoing the same process: the man who ate tins of buttermilk biscuits for breakfast when skinny and starting out is now bulked up and gym-honed, his biceps bulging in tight-fitting polo shirts; his receding hair shaved, pate shining, like the crew-cut astronaut that some observers believe the man who founded the rocket company Blue Origin (motto: "opening the promise of space to all") still one day plans to be.
Now he and Sanchez, a former TV-anchor who was married to Hollywood super agent Patrick Whitesell when she began her affair with Bezos, are reported to be looking for a new $100m superhome together in Los Angeles. Rumours of a wedding are never far.
Through Sanchez, a cast of new characters has entered Bezos's once strictly controlled life. Perhaps the most colourful is her brother Michael, who appears to have started a feud over who might be the source of tip-offs to the National Enquirer, the gossip-sheet that broke the story of the billionaire's affair and threatened to publish a "below-the-belt selfie" that he reportedly sent his paramour. It was in defamation lawsuit documents filed by Michael last week, accusing Bezos and his head of personal security, Gavin de Becker, of damaging his reputation, that news of his sister's apparent engagement was broken. Bezos has responded that the lawsuit is a way for Michael to "put himself back on the front pages and extract money from them".
These are rash times, and emotions are running high in Bezos land. Such impulsiveness is all too familiar to Telegraph columnist and therapist Linda Blair and is, she says, typical of the "sense of liberation, and freedom and elation that can come with divorce. Sometimes people act rashly… and emotions can easily overwhelm logic." She advises newly divorced men not to make big decisions quickly. "If you don't wait, there's a lot to regret. So I would say: stop and think."
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Bezos seemingly agrees. In another letter to shareholders he divided up decisions into Type 1 and Type 2.
The first are "consequential and irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don't like what you see on the other side, you can't get back to where you were before." The second are "changeable, reversible – they're two-way doors. If you've made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don't have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups."
The question is, has the reinvention of Jeff been a Type 1 or a Type 2 decision? Has he made it slowly, forever, or quickly, for now? And when it comes to his personal life, is Jeff a "high-judgment individual"? The fate of a trillion dollar company may rest on the outcome.
