Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos is engaged to Lauren Sánchez, his partner of more than four years, CNN reported Monday.
Key Takeaways
- Bezos and Sánchez, a former broadcast journalist, went public as a couple in 2019, shortly after they both divorced their then-spouses.
- The couple has kept their private life largely out of the press, but reports of their engagement spread Monday after photos surfaced of the pair on Bezos’ yacht in which Sánchez appeared to be wearing a wedding ring.
- Bezos was previously married to MacKenzie Scott, with whom he has four children, for 25 years.
Forbes Valuation
We estimate that Bezos is worth $137.8 billion as of Monday evening, making him the third-richest person in the world.
Tangent
Bezos and Sánchez had both achieved some level of celebrity by the time they began their relationship. Bezos was widely recognized as the world’s richest person in 2019, before Elon Musk surpassed him in 2021. By then, Bezos had founded and was running Amazon as the chief executive officer, a position he held until 2021 when he stepped down to focus on Blue Origin, his space start-up, and philanthropic efforts. Sánchez had made a name for herself as a media personality, starting her career as a broadcast journalist before going on to host Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance and work as an anchor on Extra. She was formerly married to Patrick Whitesell, an executive chairman at Endeavor, a holding company for talent and media agencies. In 2016, Sánchez founded Black Ops Aviation, an aerial filming company.
Key Background
Bezos and Sánchez, who had been seeing each other since 2018, were publicly outed as a couple by the National Enquirer in January 2019, one day after Bezos and his then-wife Scott filed for divorce. The National Enquirer said it had tracked Bezos and Sánchez—while they were still in other relationships—“across five states and 40,000 miles” in efforts to document the extramarital affair. Though Bezos admitted to the affair, he maintained the tabloid had the story “wrong and out of order.”
Bezos accused the National Enquirer of “extortion and blackmail,” and launched an investigation of his own into how the tabloid obtained photos and texts between him and Sánchez and photos revealing he’d had an affair. Bezos also suggested the attacks on him could be politically motivated, alluding to the National Enquirer‘s ties to then-President Donald Trump and the Saudi government, both of which were subjected to tough reporting by the Washington Post, which Bezos owns. In a post on Medium, Bezos claimed that the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him with nude photos if he wouldn’t admit the tabloid’s coverage of his affair was apolitical.
This story was first published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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