Ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos now world’s richest woman after share price rallies 91% this year
The ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has become the richest woman in the world after the astonishing rise in the company’s share price.
Mackenzie Scott, who divorced Bezos last year, is now worth £50.4billion. That makes her worth more than L’Oreal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, whose fortune totals £49.6billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The next wealthiest woman is Walmart heiress Alice Walton, who is worth an estimated £47.6billion.
Power couple: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and ex wife Mackenzie Scott before their divorce last year
Bezos and Scott met in 1992 when she was his assistant at a company called DE Shaw, and were married from 1993 to 2019.
As part of their divorce settlement, mother-of-four Scott, 50, was awarded a quarter of Bezos’s stake in Amazon.
He still owns more than 10 per cent of the firm and has a £153billion fortune.
The company’s share price has rallied by 91 per cent this year as US tech shares soared.
The online ecommerce giant raked in £750million a day on average between April and June, when lockdowns were in force in many Western countries.