Jeff Bezos’ Response to Rumors He Cheated on His Ex-Wife With Lauren Sanchez—& How Amazon Employees Discovered the Alleged Affair
Jason Pham
Jeff Bezos is onto his second marriage, but why did he and his ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, divorce in the first place? Well, it could do with his romance with his new spouse: Lauren Sanchez.
Why did Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott divorce?
Bezos and Scott announced their divorce on January 9, 2019, after 25 years of marriage. “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,” Bezos tweeted at the time. “Though the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain cherished friends.”
Related: All of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding guests
The day after, news broke that Bezos and Scott didn’t have a prenuptial agreement before their marriage, meaning that Scott would be entitled to half of Bezos’ $137 billion net worth. (In the end, Scott received a reported $38 billion in Amazon stock, as well as a 4 percent stake in the company, making her divorce settlement one of the most expensive in history.)
But why did Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott divorce? In January 2019, The National Enquirer reported that Bezos cheated on Scott with his now-wife and former Fox anchor, Lauren Sanchez. The tabloid claimed that it had been tracking Bezos for four months “across five states and 40,000 miles” before he announced his divorce from Scott. The publication also alleged that it had evidence of Bezos “whisking his mistress off to exotic destinations on his $65 million private jet.”
While Bezos didn’t deny the romance between him and Sanchez (whom he later married in 2025) at the time, his lawyer countered rumors that he had cheated on MacKenzie and told the National Enquirer that it was “widely known” that Bezos and MacKenzie had been “long separated” by the time he started seeing Sanchez. (Sanchez, for her part, was also still married to her ex-husband, Patrick Whitesell, amid rumors both she and Bezos cheated on their spouses. Sanchez and Whitesell divorced in 2019.)
The National Enquirer, for its part, claimed that its reporting was what led Bezos to publicly announce his divorce from MacKenzie. “The National Enquirer has been doggedly investigating this story for four months and the extraordinary details and evidence uncovered by our team, and presented to Mr. Bezos’ representatives for comment early this week, underscores the kind of investigative reporting that the publication has long been known for,” a spokesperson for the magazine told CNN.
Brad Stone, the author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire , also maintained that Bezos had cheated on Scott with Sanchez. In the book, Stone even included an alleged conversation between Bezos and an executive at Amazon, where he seemingly confirmed his romance with Sanchez.
“Just to set the record straight, I did have a relationship with this woman,” Bezos told executives, according to an excerpt of the book published by The New York Post. “But the story is completely wrong and out of order. MacKenzie and I have had good, healthy adult conversations about it. She is fine. The kids are fine. The media is having a field day. All of this is very distracting, so thank you for being focused on the business.”
Stone also reported that dozens of Amazon employees were “surprised and disappointed by Bezos’ affair.” “Their infallible and righteous leader was, after all, a flawed human,” he wrote.
As for how the affair was discovered, Stone claimed that it wasn’t until Bezos, who was usually “guarded” about his “intact marriage” with Scott, became distracted at work and harder to locate that employees at Amazon took note. Stone, specifically, wrote that Amazon executives knew something was up once helicopters, which Bezos famously hated, became an obsession of his. Sanchez, for her part, is the owner of the helicopter company Black Ops Aviation and a helicopter pilot in her own right.
Amazon executives were reportedly “perplexed” when they noticed the budget changes for Black Ops, which led them to investigate his affair.
Since their divorce, Scott remarried with science teacher Dan Jewett, whom she divorced in 2023. Scott and Bezos share four children: three sons and one daughter. Sanchez, for her part, has one son with her ex-boyfriend, Tony Gonzalez, and two children with her ex-husband, Patrick Whitesell.
