Let’s go ahead and not debate this. You won’t come to a satisfactorily equitable answer, no one will change their minds and we’ll just have a thread of gray comments where nothing of value was gained.

His wife supported him after he left his IB job to start Amazon. Amazon would not be without her in all probability. I argue Jeff earned half; precisely half, which would otherwise be zero without his wife's 20+ years of support.

https://www.wired.com/story/mackenzie-bezos-amazon-lone-geni...

Not being sarcastic, but support for 20 years, is a bit far fetched. At some point after inception, Amazon was successful, even before it went public.

So are you saying Amazon rose in value because Jeff had the undying support of his wife?

I would say the support helped Jeff until the company was self-sustaining and successful. Of course, without the initial support of his wife, Amazon would not have started in the first place, or perhaps, started a bit late or grow a bit slowly. Think of the counter argument. If Jeff's wife was vehemently against it, Jeff did not start any company, and then after 20 years she divorced him, she would still get a share of his money. Do lawyers then argue that since she did not support him in his endeavors, she ought to bear some of his opportunity cost?

Day to day operations were taken care of by Jeff. Extremely difficult decisions, ones that make or break a company were taken by Jeff. Hiring and firing decisions were taken by Jeff. Vision for the company originated with and sustained by Jeff.

I would not credit the wife with half of everything. Difficult to put a number to the situation. It's just sad.

I don't want this thread to devolve needlessly; in summary:

I treat my wife like my cofounder with an equal share of equity. I wouldn't let my cofounder take anything less than half of the total value of the business if a liquidation/separation/liquidity event occurred, so why would I treat my spousal relationship differently considering the work a relationship requires? If you're concerned about your partner entitled to half as not being equitable, you might consider your partner selection before the division of equity.

This applies whether I'm worth a thousand dollars, or a billion dollars.

EDIT: Was I being judgemental? It was intended more as "Choose Wisely" from Indiana Jones. As you mention sytelus, most of success is luck, but you can make every effort to pick the right partner.

I am not commenting on the law. The law says a divorced wife gets half of whatever. I don't care.

What I do care is the notion that the growth and success of Amazon is 50% due to the wife. That I disagree with.

Assume you need atleast $100K to start a business but you have only $90K. Your friend comes around and puts in $10K but only if you are willing to offer 50% ownership. Given no other choices, you agree and work your ass off for next 25 years to grow business to $100B while your friend did nothing else for it.

Does your friend deserve $50B? I am not asking from legal point of view because that answer would be yes. I am asking this from philosophical perspective. Clearly if your friend didn’t lend you $10K, you wouldn’t have your $100B business. But that’s the seed stage only work your friend did. Does he deserve fruits of your 25 years of labor? Does your friend deserve that stack because he took risk without knowledge of how future would turn out?

This is one the deepest question that has huge consequences all the way in to the concept of money, capital, debt, rewards, collaboration and purpose itself.

"Who can say how much Randi Zuckerberg is worth?"

"She believes she is worth all her money, she believes she is more than Mark's sister, she believes she has valuable opinions. Anyone who disagrees is a hater. You're just jealous. "No, she's a fool!" Then how come she's so rich?

Those who are enraged by her are actually suffering from the same delusion she is [..] The standard criticism of her is that she didn't really do anything to deserve her money-- "she got rich because of her brother"-- but this is a profound disavowal of the reality: she got rich because of timing-- even though her job at Facebook was trivial, she was there from the beginning and got paid in stock options. What's interesting is that no one makes this criticism of her, because that's what her haters believe is supposed to happen to them.

[..] even her haters want the money to mean retroactively they were already deserving of it, this kind of fortune has bypassed reality testing and instead creates a new reality, it uses the truth in order to lie: of course I'm not rich because of my work product, duh, you can't measure a human being's value based on his labor. I'm rich because that's what I'm worth. "Isn't that specious reasoning?" Oh, dear, sweet, earnest, Lisa, I want to buy your rock.*

And so the hatred of her, like all hate, is revealed to be a defense. To her haters Randi is a buffoon, a step above relationship expert, she is too glaringly undeserving of that money; Randi is an obscene counterexample to the logic that the payout mirrors value and self worth. She is a narcissistic injury for everyone else. So she's disparaged in a specific way: she doesn't deserve all that money because she got it from her brother."

- https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2014/03/who_can_know_how_muc...

It's easy (and fun!) to go down the rabbit hole philosophically.

Does Jeff deserve billions of dollars more than the hundreds of thousands of Amazon employees who have collectively built the company? Are their fruits of their labor worth so much less than his, regardless of Jeff's hard business decisions and many more hours per week worked, simply because of how equity is constructed and distributed? Jeff has clearly spent over 20 years building his company, nights, weekends, missed time with family he'll never get back, but can you point to the decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Jeff alone?

Value, its attribution, and its equitable distribution is hard, and executed in an imperfect fashion.

In capitalism, rewards are proportional to how much capital you have (either your own or borrowed), your efforts are minimally material.

But capital alone is no indicator of ownership interest grants (see: advisors or key employees who are granted equity for their contributions [1]).

Rewards in capitalism are to those who can convince others of value provided in exchange for an equity interest; capital is only a small part of that. Lots of equity is sweat equity!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Parker#Facebook

Are you personal friends with them? I mean, how would you know?

I have seen this go both ways. Some spouses give everything for other to succeed while some become extra work in addition to what you already have. Lot depends on circumstances, personallies and loads of luck. Let’s not be judgmental here.

Jeff's parents supported him when he left his hedge fund job at D.E. Shaw. He was a quant and he had been there 4 years. He left his bonus on the table when he left but he was extremely well paid. He wasn't exactly hurting for cash.

It's already well established fact that Jeff's/Amazon's costs in the early days were paid for with his parents' life savings.

You interpreted "support" differently than I:

"The couple was leaving behind a wealthy existence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, according to Brad Stone, the author of the 2013 book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. “They gave up a really comfortable lifestyle and successful careers to move across the country and start something on the internet,” says Stone. “The only reason [Jeff] was able to do that is because he had an extremely supportive spouse. It was an incredible risk and one that they both took on jointly.”

"In a 2010 commencement speech he gave at Princeton, Jeff himself acknowledged the gamble his wife had taken. “I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that,” he said. “MacKenzie … told me I should go for it.” (Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)"

And yet spousal support after a divorce isn't in the form of "yes, you should take the extremely risky move of living without my billions of dollars. I support your doing this."

Such are the perils of a billionaire's marriage dissolving in a community property state. Marriage and living in Washington state are voluntary actions. My argument was for more value of a partner's contributions to business success, regardless of statute.

EDIT: @busterarm: We're not going to agree on what defines "earned", good chat.

Yes, but then regulatory hazard isn't the same thing as earning the money. It's just being entitled to it.

Edit: I'm pretty sure Amazon shareholders won't agree with you about the definition of "earned" either. It's not just cash at stake here, it's voting power. Is that spousal support worth 8.5% control of the company? Up from 0%.

I'm not saying she isn't entitled to it, just that there's a difference between value through entitlement and value through work.

It's not 8.5% from 0%. Its 8.5% from 16%.

Says Stone.

Honestly, I find that this stuff is as romanticized as the Old South.

> Jeff earned half; precisely half, which would otherwise be zero without his wife's 20+ years of support.

No, Jeff's wife was not in the room making the business decisions that were needed to be made to amass their fortune.

Let's say she watched the kids and maintained the house with no help. That's a mighty contribution, but there are other stay at home spouses that do that too who would be entitled to far less in a separation solely because of the money their partner has made.

So why does she get billions and the average stay at home divorcee gets thousands? Was her contribution to the family a million times more valuable than the average stay at home spouse?

No, Jeff made the money and she's entitled to half. They both knew that going in and know that now. She didn't earn billions through parenting that was so much better than anyone else or create that much more value than the average spouse, but she is entitled to half by law.

To put it another way, if they had signed a prenup and he had paid her $1000/hr 24/7 for 30 years, she would have earned $262 million. Or about 250 times less than the ~$65 billion she could get.

Instead, she walks away with having made about $290k per hour every hour every day for the 25 years they were married. That's a lot of support.