Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie announce they are divorcing (AMZN)

Dia Dipasupil / Staff

• Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, are getting divorced after 25 years of marriage.
• Jeff Bezos is the world's richest person.
• Read the entire statement below. 

Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said that he will divorce his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, in a tweet on Wednesday.

"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," the couple wrote in the statement. 

"If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again," it continued. 

MacKenzie Bezos was one of Amazon's first employees. The couple met at D.E. Shaw, a bank, before Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. They have four kids. 

In Amazon lore, part of the company's business plan was written while Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos drove across the country from New York to Seattle. 

MacKenzie Bezos is a novelist, and has written books including "The Testing of Luther Albright" and "Traps."

MacKenzie previously told Vogue that their contrasting personalities complement each other. "He likes to meet people. He's a very social guy. Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking. The brevity of conversations, the number of them — it's not my sweet spot," she said.

Today, Bezos is worth over $137 billion, according to Bloomberg, making him the richest person in the world. 

Here's the full statement: 

Here's the statement in plain text: 

"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. 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 and ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures. Through the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain cherished friends."

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