Jeff Bezos has been seeing estranged wife of Hollywood mogul
The world’s richest couple is headed for splitsville — but a new power pairing is already in the making.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife of 25 years announced in a tweet Wednesday that they are divorcing — as it emerged that the billionaire tech tycoon is now in a relationship with their glamorous neighbor.
Bezos has been dating Lauren Sanchez, a former TV anchor for Fox’s “Good Day LA” and the wife of Hollywood talent mogul Patrick Whitesell, sources tell The Post.
The news comes as Bezos revealed his split from wife MacKenzie via Twitter.
“We want to make people aware of a development in our lives,” Bezos tweeted just days before his 55th birthday.
“As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.”
But just in September, Bezos and MacKenzie, who have four children, were spotted celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary at LIV nightclub in Miami.
“They were definitely still together,” said a source, adding that they looked happy as they snapped photos in the DJ booth and danced the night away.
By late October, the multibillionaire was seen at the private Casa Tua club with a different woman who looked a lot like Sanchez, sources say.
Bezos, 54, and Sanchez, 49 — who is also a helicopter pilot — got to know each other through her husband, an agent to stars including Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Kevin Costner and Hugh Jackman.
But sources say Sanchez became closer to Bezos after she and Whitesell separated in the fall.
“Patrick and Lauren have socialized with Jeff Bezos and his wife for a few years, because both [now former] couples have houses in Seattle,” a source said.
“Then Lauren was hired to work on one of Bezos’ projects, ‘Blue Origin,’ a space-launch company, as a helicopter pilot. She has been shooting aerial shots for Bezos.”
Sanchez and Whitesell wed in 2005 and have two young children. She also has a teenage son from her first marriage, to former NFL star Tony Gonzalez. Sanchez and Whitesell have not yet formally filed for divorce.
The brunette bombshell and Bezos were seen together in LA the day of the Golden Globes — first at the Beverly Hills Hotel and later getting “touchy” at Amazon’s after-party, sources said.
Bezos made the divorce announcement on Wednesday knowing that photos of himself and Sanchez could soon be made public.
A source close to Bezos said, “Jeff and McKenzie tried very hard to work things out. They separated last year, then Jeff and Lauren started dating. McKenzie knew they were dating; the news today was not a surprise to her. Lauren was with Jeff at the Golden Globes because they are dating.”
The tech tycoon sits at the top of the Bloomberg billionaires index, with a net worth of $137 billion — but he could have to cede the crown to Bill Gates depending on how the couple’s massive fortune is sliced up. It’s unclear if they have a prenup.
Washington is a “community property state” — meaning divorcing couples without an existing agreement split their assets 50-50.
That would see MacKenzie — a 48-year-old novelist — exiting the union with a net worth of nearly $68 billion, dropping Jeff to just the fifth-richest person on the planet, while she would become the richest woman in the world.
Jeff owns a 16 percent stake in Amazon — which vaulted past Microsoft this week to become the world’s most valuable company — accounting for nearly all of their wealth.
But even if MacKenzie has a legitimate claim on half of her husband’s shares in the company, it wouldn’t be smart to divide it if she’s taking the long view, analysts say.
That’s because selling half of his 80 million shares would dilute his control of the company — an event that could diminish their value and rattle Wall Street.
“I can’t imagine that she’d do anything to disrupt the company,” said Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter.
But MacKenzie is likely to get a significant chunk of the fortune because Bezos made it all while they were married, said leading Manhattan divorce lawyer Michael Stutman.
Marilyn Chinitz, a litigator who has handled high-profile divorces for such celebs as like Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas, added: “Most likely they have already resolved the financial aspects of the case before they made the announcement.”
Chinitz speculated that MacKenzie will get less than half her husband’s assets.
There is an eye-popping real-estate portfolio on the line.
The Bezoses own a sprawling home in Medina, Wash., a ranch in Van Horn, Texas, a Beverly Hills mansion, a condo in Manhattan and a 27,000-square-foot former museum that was recently converted into a single-family home in DC — making Bezos the 25th biggest landowner in the nation.
It’s a far cry from the world he grew up in.
Bezos was born in New Mexico in 1964 to a teen mom and a dad who spent his days performing in a unicycle troupe and working retail for $1.25 an hour, according to CNBC.
The parents soon split, and his mom married a Cuban immigrant who worked for Exxon. The family later moved to Miami, where Bezos worked as a cook at McDonald’s while in high school before attending the University of Florida and then Princeton.
After graduating, he made his way into the banking industry where he quickly ascended to the role of vice president at hedge fund D.E. Shaw by age 30.
That’s where he met MacKenzie — when he interviewed the then-23-year-old fellow Princeton grad for a job.
MacKenzie, who graduated six years after Bezos, landed the gig as a research associate and the two office neighbors fell in love — fast.
She made the first move by asking Jeff out to lunch. “My office was next door to his, and all day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,” she recalled in a 2013 interview with Vogue. “How could you not fall in love with that laugh?”
Within three months, they were engaged and, three months later in 1993, they were hitched.
“I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy and hot, but I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her, so I knew exactly what her SATs were,” Bezos once told Vogue.
In 1994, the newlyweds quit their Wall Street jobs and moved cross-country to Seattle, where Jeff launched Amazon out of their garage — growing it from an online bookstore to one of the biggest retailers on the planet.
MacKenzie was one of the first employees.
“To me, watching your spouse, somebody that you love, have an adventure — what is better than that?” MacKenzie told CBS.
The couple went on to have four children — three sons and a daughter adopted from China — now in their teens.
In 2000 Bezos founded spaceflight company Blue Origin, which launched a rocket into space in 2015. And in 2013 he purchased The Washington Post for $250 million in cash — and the paper finally turned a profit in 2016.
MacKenzie, meanwhile, spent 10 years writing her debut novel, “The Testing of Luther Albright,” which was published in 2005. She followed it up with “Traps” eight years later.
The writing was slow-going because she was focused on their kids, she told Vogue — first with home-schooling and later dropping them off and picking them up at school every day in a Honda minivan.
Last year, Bezos and MacKenzie launched the homeless charity Day One Fund together.
Sanchez and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.
A rep for Bezos said, “Jeff remains focused on and engaged in all aspects of Amazon.”
Additional reporting by Lisa Fickenscher, Julia Marsh and Mara Siegler
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