Relationships Talk

The world’s richest couple, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos, have announced that they are divorcing.

On Jan. 9, 2019, the Bezoses released a joint statement via social media that they have decided to end their marriage after 25 years.

“We want to make people aware of a development in our lives. 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,” their tweet read. “We feel incredibly lucky to have found each other and deeply grateful for every one of the years we have been married to each other. If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again. We’ve had such a great life together as a married couple, and we also see wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.”

Of course, this news has brought up a lot of questions about the couple and their family. Here are the answers to what the CEO’s net worth is, how many kids the Bezoses have, and what career advice the world’s richest man gives his children.

How many children they have

The billionaire executive and his novelist wife have four children; one daughter, who they adopted from China, and three sons. Jeff was adopted himself at a young age by his stepfather, Cuban immigrant Miguel “Mike” Bezos, an engineer at Exxon.

When it comes to the advice he gives his own children, Bezos tells them they need to work hard and be proud of the choices they make, not what they can accomplish easily.

“When you have a gift and then you work hard, you’re really going to leverage that gift,” Bezos said at a New York gala for FIRST last November. “That’s going to make it easier for you to make that choice to work hard. When you have a gift and then you work hard, you’re really going to leverage that gift. You’ll get to work with like-minded people and you’re going to energize the room. If you’re doing something you love, the day is going to be so fun … You’ve gotta figure out what you love. And it’s going to bring you great joy.”

Jeff Bezos’ net worth

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos | David Ryder/Getty Images

Bezos tops the list of rich Americans and is currently the wealthiest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $137 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Bezos started Amazon after he married MacKenzie and she recalled the early days of the company in a 2013 review on the site. “I was there when he wrote the business plan, and I worked with him and many others represented in the converted garage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented offices, the Christmas-rush distribution centers, and the door-desk filled conference rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history,” she wrote.

With such a massive fortune at stake, this could turn out to be an extremely costly divorce.

Read more: Blake Nordstrom: How Much Was His Family and the Company Worth At the Time of His Death?

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“Delete everything. Wipe your Instagram, get a new Facebook account and request every dick pic you’ve dared to send to come back.”

In efforts to appease fits of manufactured conservative rage over the moderation of hateful content on social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter have relied on the advice of anti-LGBTQ extremists and far-right grifters “to help them figure out who should be banned and what’s considered unacceptable.”

As reported by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook sought out the advice of right-wing groups including extremists like the virulently anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council (FRC) and its president, Tony Perkins. Perkins has compared same-sex marriage to incest, blamed marriage equality and abortion for a destructive hurricane, and called pedophilia a “homosexual problem.” He is clearly not equipped to be an arbitrator on content that oppresses, harassed, and erases minorities. Perkins, along with FRC, has actively opposed LGBTQ equality around the world, supporting a law in Uganda that could have punished “repeat offenders” of same-sex sexual activity with the death penalty, and collaborating with a hate group that worked to pass Russia’s “gay propaganda” law. Domestically, Perkins also called for the State Department to stop supporting LGBTQ rights after President Donald Trump was elected.

Moreover, FRC senior fellow Ken Blackwell has used his Facebook page to regularly push out links from right-wing propaganda sites that have a history of promoting anti-Muslim fake news and conspiracy theories. Blackwell also took part in what was seemingly a promotional campaign with Liftable Media, which owns right-wing propaganda sites like The Western Journal and relies on right-wing media figures to draw online traffic to its pages. And he has shared misleading memes and content from Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the company behind the 2016 presidential election interference on Facebook. Blackwell is also on the board of the NRA, and once blamed the mass shooting at UCSB by a men’s rights supporter on marriage equality.

The Journal’s article also reports that the Heritage Foundation, which has a long history of climate denial and gets funding from fossil fuel companies, has recently “forged a relationship with Facebook.” On Facebook, Heritage Foundation’s media arm, The Daily Signal, has put out anti-science garbage like “Why climate change is fake news,” contributing to Facebook’s climate-denial problem. In 2013, Heritage came under fire for hiring a researcher who wrote that Hispanic immigrants may never “reach IQ parity with whites.”  (The researcher later resigned following outrage.)

Twitter has also sought the advice of right-wing grifters and anti-abortion advocates. According to the Journal, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been in contact with Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist, and Norquist has used that access to successfully lobby for conservatives who had trouble getting anti-abortion ads on Twitter. Anti-abortion groups have a habit of claiming censorship in order to bully social media platforms into allowing them to run “inflammatory” content.

Dorsey also privately sought the advice of Ali Akbar, a right-wing personality with a prominent Twitter presence, when dealing with the question of whether to remove conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from the platform. (After a murky process filled with half-measures to address Jones’ many policy violations, Twitter and its streaming service Periscope finally removed Jones.) Akbar’s history of promoting hateful content on Twitter and Periscope makes him a poor choice for a consultant on hateful content. He once hosted Matt Colligan (“Millennial Matt”) — a participant in the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA — for a Periscope video in which Colligan waved a flag that had a Nazi swastika. Akbar, who has claimed his talks with Dorsey have been going on for months, was recently briefly suspended from Twitter, seemingly after a tweet in which he accused media of egging on a “civil war in America” and urged his followers to buy guns and ammo. His account was reinstated within a couple of days.

These examples show tech platforms’ tendency of caving to conservative whims in order to appease manufactured rage over baseless claims of censorship and bias. Evidence shows that right-wing pages drastically outnumber left-wing pages on Facebook, and under Facebook’s algorithm changes, conservative meme pages outperform all other political news pages. Across platforms, right-wing sources dominate topics like immigration coverage, showing the cries of censorship are nothing more than a tactic. And judging by tech companies’ willingness to cater to these tantrums, the tactic appears to be working.

Britain on Wednesday announced it would immediately end its policy of asking women rescued from forced marriages abroad to take out loans to cover the cost of helping them, following a backlash.

The practice came to light last week with reports that four British women who were freed from a punishment institution in Somalia were each charged £740 ($940, 820 euros).

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt revealed on Wednesday that “after careful consideration, I have decided that victims of forced marriage helped to return to the UK… will no longer be asked to take out a loan for their repatriation costs.

“Our treatment of vulnerable Britons abroad should always be guided by compassion, so I am glad to make this policy change,” he added, in a letter sent to Tom Tugendhat, Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Victims were reportedly told they had to fund their flight back to Britain, basic food and shelter costs.

Those who were aged over 18 and could not pay had to sign emergency loan agreements with the Foreign Office.

The ministry helped bring back 55 forced marriage victims in 2016 and 27 in 2017.

The four young women who were found in a “correctional school” in Somalia had been sent to the religious institution by their families and reported being chained to the walls and whipped with hosepipes.

Some had their legs shackled, spent days locked in a small box, were burned with hot sticks and forced to sit in their own urine unless they accepted a forced marriage, The Times said.

The Foreign Office and the Home Office interior ministry run the Forced Marriage Unit, which from 2009 to 2017 gave advice or support to nearly 12,800 people.

Since 2014, forced marriage has been a crime in Britain carrying a maximum seven-year prison sentence.

In the past two years, the Foreign Office has lent £7,765 to at least eight forced marriage victims who could not pay for their repatriation.

Around £3,000 has been repaid, although debts of more than £4,500 are outstanding.

News of the charges prompted criticism.

Yvette Cooper, who chairs parliament’s Home Affairs Committee which scrutinises the interior ministry’s work, said she was “completely appalled”.