Divorce Is Painful and Exhausting

I also wanted to comment on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s impending divorce from his wife, MacKenzie. So far the commentary I’ve read has been tremendously lacking in insight and narrow, mostly musing over whether MacKenzie would sell the Amazon stock she will inevitably end up with (Washington is a community property state and they’ve been married since 1993, when Amazon was just a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye). I will not comment on the implications of that or the implications of his being off chasing a bimbo.

Anyone who’s ever been a manager knows that the most valuable and scarce asset of any company is management time and that management time and attention are indispensable. There is only so much of them. For the next months or years Jeff Bezos’s time will be even more divided than it has been. Divorce is painful and exhausting and every second he devotes to it he won’t be devoting to Amazon.com.

If you think that Amazon just growed (like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), that won’t be of concern to you. If you think it became what it has become because of Jeff Bezos that should worry you a lot.

I will also predict that there will be a stockholders suit claiming that the lack of a pre-nuptial agreement between Bezos and his wife should have been disclosed. That will be another darned thing to deal with.