Digital media giant IAC is in advanced talks to acquire print publishing giant Meredith Corp. in a potential deal that could exceed $2.5 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
IAC, chaired by Barry Diller, has pulled ahead of private equity firm The Najafi Companies and other potential buyers and could reach an agreement with Meredith in the next few days, according to The Journal.
IAC and Meredith did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
IAC, which owns brands including Investopedia and Brides, downsized its portfolio when it spun off Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, OkCupid, and a majority of the major US dating platforms.
Acquiring Meredith, which publishes dozens of magazines including People, Better Homes & Gardens, and InStyle, would significantly boost its holdings – and mark a major pivot for Meredith, which bought Time for $1.8 billion in 2018.
Meredith titles acquired via the deal would become part of IAC’s publishing division, Dotdash, according to The Journal.
Billionaires are often known for their luxurious lifestyles and high profile gadgets.
Some billionaires, like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, buy private planes to take control of the open skies – others purchase yachts to access the open seas.
From Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, many leaders in tech have created their own mini vacation hubs at sea, decking their boats with amenities like gyms, spas, pools, nightclubs, and movie theaters.
If you want to find out what life is like aboard these multi-million-dollar yachts, some of them are available to rent out for a few nights or weeks at a time. For instance, late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s yacht is expected to be available for rent for around $1 million per week, The Guardian reported. In the past, chartering yachts owned by billionaires like Alphabet President Sergey Brin has cost customers anywhere from $773,000 a week to $1.2 million.
Take a look at some of the yachts that have been owned by tech billionaires.
A mystery buyer bought a 414-foot superyacht that was once owned by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen for $278 million. Allen had the boat, which was named “Octopus,” built in 2003 for $200 million. Since the tech billionaires death in 2018, the boat has been listed for as much as $325 million.
The undisclosed Scandinavian buyer is expected to charter the yacht for the first time in January 2022 via major yachting broker, Camper & Nicholsons. A price has yet to be announced for renting the boat, but it is expected to be around $1 million per week.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is building his own 127-meter yacht, according to a book. The yacht is so massive it has an additional “support yacht” with its own helipad.
Ellison has owned several superyachts over the years, including the Katana, the Ronin, and the Rising Sun.
The Oracle cofounder also has a knack for competitive yacht racing, and helped to found and back a racing team, called Oracle Team USA, in 2000. The team has found success and won several prestigious titles over the years.
Ellison previously owned a bigger, 454-foot yacht called Rising Sun, which was designed specifically for the CEO in 2005. That yacht reportedly has 82 rooms, a movie theater, a wine cellar, and a basketball court. However, Ellison sold off the Rising Sun to Geffen for a reported $300 million.
Ellison’s boat, Musashi, is a sister ship to the yacht of another billionaire, former Sears CEO Eddie Lampert. However, the yacht, named Fountainhead, is often mistaken for belonging to billionaire investor Mark Cuban. “The guy who owns the boat tells everyone that it’s mine,” Cuban told Page Six in 2016. “It’s so crazy … I don’t even own a boat.”
Ellison’s yacht reportedly influenced the decision of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs to get a boat himself. However, Jobs never set foot on the boat – the yacht was commissioned in 2008, but wasn’t completed until 2012, a year after his death.
When Jobs died in 2011, his yacht – along with his $14.1 billion fortune – was inherited by his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of a social-impact nonprofit called the Emerson Collective. The 256-foot yacht in named Venus, and is worth $130 million.
Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are two of the richest people in the world. The two billionaires are known to splurge: In addition to each owning a super yacht, they both own private planes as well.
Page owns a yacht named Senses, a $45 million 194-foot boat that he bought in 2011 from a New Zealand businessman. The yacht has a private beach club with a Jacuzzi and sun beds, both indoor and outdoor dining areas, and a helicopter pad.
Meanwhile, Brin owns a longer, 240-foot yacht that he bought for a cool $80 million in 2011. It’s reportedly one of the world’s fastest super yachts, and is equipped with a dance floor and open-air movie theater.
Brin’s yacht is named Dragonfly. The boat shares a name with Google’s once-secret project to launch a censored search engine in China. Google said in 2019 it had officially terminated the project.
But Brin and Page aren’t the only two high-powered Google figures with yachts. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt owns a 194-foot yacht name Oasis. The yacht reportedly features a pool and a gym-turned-nightclub. He bought the boat in 2009 for a reported $72.3 million.
For Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom, his interest in yachts skews toward racing and competitive sailing. Zennstrom has gone through a succession of boats all named Ran, and his most recent purchase is the seventh in the series.
His latest yacht, appropriately named Ran VII, is the most technologically advanced of all of Zennstrom’s boats. The racing yacht uses electrical power, which Zennstrom says makes it “lighter, less drag, quieter, and most importantly it is environmentally friendly.”
The 40-foot yacht will compete in regattas through the racing team owned by Zennstrom and his wife, Catherine. The Ran racing team launched in 2008, and has won some prestigious regattas.
The sailing yacht, named Eos, is 350 feet long with six bedrooms. The power couple has hosted many celebrities over the years – a few that have been spotted aboard Eos include model Karlie Kloss, actor Bradley Cooper, journalist Anderson Cooper, and singer Harry Styles.
For Jim Clark, the cofounder of Netscape, one yacht hasn’t been enough. Clark has owned boats for more than 30 years, and in 2012, he put up two of his sailing yachts for sale.
Clark listed the boats for a combined $113 million: the 136-foot Hanuman for $18 million, and the 295-foot Athena for $95 million. However, Clark has yet to offload Athena. Clark also previously owned a 155-foot yacht named Hyperion, and currently also owns a racing yacht named Comanche.
Charles Simonyi worked at Microsoft until 2002, and oversaw the creation of Microsoft Office software. A few years before he left, Simonyi decided to purchase a yacht. He told the designer that wanted his yacht to be “home away from [his] home in Seattle.”
The product of that conversation in 1999 is Simonyi’s yacht named Skat, meaning “treasure” in Danish. The yacht measures 233 feet long, and is unique with its nontraditional design and gray color. Skat features a matching gray helicopter, a gym, and motorcycles.
Opulent British billionaire Richard Branson owned a yacht until he sold it in September 2018. The 105-foot catamaran sold for $3 million, significantly lower than the $9.6 million price Branson listed the boat for in 2014.
The Sun Valley conference is officially in full swing.
This week, A-listers from the worlds of tech, media, and finance are descending upon Sun Valley, Idaho, for a week of networking, panel discussions, and outdoor pursuits hosted by private investment bank Allen & Co.
The annual event, which was canceled last year due to the pandemic, has historically been a breeding ground for blockbuster deals: Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post was born out of conversations at Sun Valley, and Disney’s $19 billion acquisition of ABC was hatched at Sun Valley as well.
While we’ll have to wait and see what comes of this year’s conference, we can at least get a glimpse of which moguls have arrived at this year’s ultra-exclusive enclave.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, Tom Bernthal
SoFi CEO Anthony Noto
David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Communications
IAC Chairman Barry Diller
Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos, co-CEOs of Netflix
Aurora CEO Chris Urmson
Former hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller
Rakuten CEO Mickey Mikitani
Greg Maffei, CEO Liberty Media and chairman of Live Nation Entertainment
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts
Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of partnerships
Disney chairman Bob Iger
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon
Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors
Retired US Army General David Petraeus arrives for the conference.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek
Former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong
Brain Grazer, the founder of Imagine Entertainment, and his wife, Veronica Smiley
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg
Jason Kilar, CEO of WarnerMedia
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick
Shari Redstone, chairman of ViacomCBS
Jeff Shell, CEO of NBCUniversal
Survey Monkey CEO Zander Lurie
Former New York City mayor and former presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg
While some tech leaders, like Mark Zuckerberg, have been with their partners since college, notable figures in the tech sector have gravitated toward partners with just as much – or more! – power and pull in their industries.
Some are becoming new parents: This month, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Jen Rubio, the CEO of luggage startup Away, announced the birth of their first child together. The couple got engaged in May 2019, but postponed a planned wedding in Peru after the pandemic hit.
Others, sadly, have broken up: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his wife, now MacKenzie Scott, announced in early 2019 that they were getting a divorce. And one of the most famous power couples in the world, Bill and Melinda Gates, are now headed for divorce as well.
Still, there are 14 other notable couples that hail from Silicon Valley who are still going strong.
Who they are: Rubio is the CEO of luggage startup Away, and Butterfield in the cofounder and CEO of work messaging platform Slack.
Their backstory: The relationship between Rubio and Butterfield initially flew under the radar, but it came under the spotlight in May 2019 when Butterfield jokingly proposed to Rubio on Twitter. Butterfield’s Twitter proposal followed news that Away had landed a $1.4 billion valuation, and the Slack CEO joked he wasn’t “just a goldigger.”
Butterfield and Rubio both acknowledged the proposal was a joke after a few hours. They got engaged for real that Memorial Day and announced the birth of their first child together, Oliver, in May 2021.
A post shared by Emily Weiss (@emilyweiss) on Mar 18, 2020 at 10:25pm PDT
Who they are: Weiss is the cofounder and CEO of online makeup company Glossier. Gaybrick is the chief product officer at payments platform Stripe. Glossier is valued at more than $1 billion, while Stripe is the most valuable US startup with a valuation of $95 billion.
Their backstory: Not a whole lot about their relationship has been shared publicly. The couple made their relationship public in an Instagram post from New Years Day of 2019, then announced their engagement in a post in March 2020.
“Even during the wildest most uncertain times, there are silver linings,” Weiss wrote in the caption for the Instagram photo. Their engagement came just as the World Health Organization classified the coronavirus as a “pandemic.”
Evan Spiegel and Miranda Kerr
Who they are: Spiegel is the cofounder and CEO of Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company. Kerr was, at one time, one of the highest-earning models in the world, and is currently the founder of wellness company KORA Organics.
Who they are: Brin is the cofounder of Google. Shanahan is the founder of law-tech company ClearAccessIP and the Bia-Echo Foundation.
Their backstory: The couple has been linked since 2015, when they were seen together at the star-studded wedding for a dating app CEO in Jamaica. The couple reportedly have a baby girl together who was born in late 2018, although they’ve kept information about their child under wraps. Brin has two other children from his previous marriage to 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki.
It was revealed in October 2019 that Brin and Shanahan have been married since 2018, but there were no other details made public about the wedding.
Karlie Kloss and Joshua Kushner
Who they are: Kushner is the founder of venture capital firm Thrive Capital and is the cofounder of health insurance startup Oscar Health. Kloss is a prominent model who runs coding camps for young girls called Kode with Klossy.
Who they are: Zuckerberg is the CEO and cofounder of Facebook. Chan is a former pediatrician. Together, the couple launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropy focused on science and education.
Who they are: Ohanian is the cofounder of Reddit, and later cofounded the VC firm Initialized Capital. Williams is one of the best tennis players in the world, and ranks third on the all-time list of most winning players with 39 major tournament titles. In 2014, Williams launched her own investment firm, Serena Ventures, to invest in companies like Billie, Tonal, and Daily Harvest.
Their backstory: The couplemet in May 2015 in Rome, and started dating that same year. They got engaged at the end of 2016 at the same place in Rome where they had first met. Williams gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian, in 2017, and they got married later that year.
Marissa Mayer and Zachary Bogue
Who they are: Mayer is the former CEO of Yahoo, and the cofounder of software company Sunshine. Prior to Yahoo, she was Google’s 20th employee. Bogue is a cofounder and managing partner at the investment firm DCVC.
Their backstory: The couple met through a mutual friend in 2007, and got married two years later. Mayer announced her first pregnancy in 2012 on the same day she was publicly named Yahoo’s CEO. She gave birth to identical twin girls in 2015.
Marc Benioff and Lynne Benioff
Who they are: Marc Benioff is the founder and CEO of enterprise cloud company Salesforce. Lynne Benioff is a notable philanthropist who serves on the board of the nonprofit ONE, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, the Benioff Ocean Initiative, and others.
Who they are: David Morin helped to create Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect, and cofounded Path, a now-defunct photo-based platform. He’s currently an investor with VC firm Offline Ventures. Brit Morin is the founder of Brit + Co., a popular lifestyle media company for millennial women.
Their backstory: The pair first met when they both were working at Apple years ago. They got engaged in 2011 after an elaborate proposal set in the Maldives, and got married the following year.
Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz
Who they are: Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz cofounded the ticketing company Eventbrite in 2006. He is currently a chairman at the company, while she serves as CEO.
Who they are: Diller founded the Internet company IAC in 1995, and now serves as a chairman for that company and for Expedia. Furstenberg is a lauded fashion designer who first rose to fame after marrying into a royal German family.
Their backstory: The couple got married in 2001, but have had an on-and-off relationship and friendship that’s spanned more than 40 years. They first met in the 1970s at a party Diller was hosting.
Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston
Who they are: Graham and Livingston helped found Y Combinator, a wildly successful startup accelerator program that’s produced companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, and Stripe.
Who they are: Greene and Rosenblum both helped found the cloud computing software company VMware in 1998. They also cofounded the cloud startup Bebop, which Google acquired in 2015. Greene was put in charge of Google’s cloud computing unit, and later sat on Alphabet’s board of directors. Greene is now chairman of the MIT Corporation, which is Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s board of trustees.
Their backstory: The couple met while attending the University of California, Berkeley, when Rosenblum gave Greene a ride on his motorcycle. They have two children together.
“[The park is] really important for mental health purposes,” Celine Armstrong, the project executive for Little Island, told Insider. “You need green space, you need people to have a place to relax, and in order to do that, you need private dollars.”
The Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation, headed by power couple Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, funded the majority of the public park.
Diller currently serves as the chairman of IAC and Expedia, but previously ran companies like QVC and Fox.
His wife, Diane von Fürstenberg, is a fashion powerhouse with an eponymous fashion line.
The couple’s foundation has previously poured millions of dollars into public parks, and its long list of grantees include the Central Park Conservancy and the High Line.
But the foundation’s latest push for Little Island may be the biggest yet: the park is the “largest private public donation to public open space in New York City’s history” …
… and the second largest private donation to a public open space in the country, according to Armstrong.
The foundation donated $260 million to Little Island, and will continue giving an additional $120 million through the next decade for upkeep and the park’s shows, Adrian Gaut reported for Wall Street Journal.
His wife, von Fürstenberg, was also involved by attending design meetings. Her attributions can be seen in the most minute of details on Little Island: she picked the bronze handrails, according to Armstrong.
Little Island’s history spans back to 2013 when Diller partnered with the Hudson River Park Trust to reimagine Pier 54 – which had been damaged by Hurricane Sandy – as a public space and subsequently, a park.
The starting team then tapped firms like Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects’ Signe Nielsen and Heatherwick Studio – which previously designed NYC’s controversial but flashy Vessel – to design and plan the logistics of Little Island.
The park looks incredibly similar to its initial concepts, according to Armstrong.
She believes this was possible in part because Diller and his family were patient, flexible, and able to fund all of the research and development necessary for the Little Island’s unique design and appearance.
The majority of the park’s timeline was consumed by the design process, and not construction: “luckily if the design is good, you can efficiently build it because trades know what they’re doing,” Armstrong said.
And after a slew of lawsuits, subsequent intervention from both Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and issues with rising cost – as reported by the New York Times – the park was finally completed and unveiled to the city’s residents on May 21.
“Given how many revolutions this went through, from starting to dying and starting again, I was actually awestruck when I could actually look up and see it,” Diller told the Wall Street Journal. “I walked on [the island] and felt pure, actual joy, which is not something I can say happens very often.”
Like most public parks in the city, Little Island is free for all visitors.
It’s open from 6 a.m. through 1 a.m., but for now, guests are required to make a reservation for visits after 12 p.m.
Luckily, I was able to visit the park a day before it’s grand opening. So let’s take a look inside.
New Yorkers driving by on the West Side Highway have been ogling at the park’s unique foundation for many months now.
And for a good reason: Little Island is visually unlike any other park in New York City.
“What I’ve heard Mr. Diller say often is that the park just transports you to Oz,” Armstrong said. “You are transported into a different place and you have time to just wander around and be amazed at every turn, each pathway.
The entire island sits on top of 280 concrete piles, the leftover structure from the pier, and 132 concrete “tulips,” according to a press release.
The concrete tulips, which are all different shapes, are arguably the most eye-catching feature of the park.
They tower above the Hudson River at varying cascading heights, mimicking the flow of the water beneath it.
“I love high design and innovation and just pushing the boundaries of what could be built, and this does that,” Armstrong said. “It allowed us to tinker and really collaborate with everyone, so your ego is checked at the door.”
From the outside looking in, the park looks like bundles of green foliage and bronze fences atop the concrete, tulip-shaped pillars.
And inside the park, it’s unusually peaceful and lush compared to the bustle of New York City.
Little Island also offers unique glimpses of the city through varying vantage points.
The views of New York City from inside Little Island are unlike any rooftop Manhattan has to offer.
Some parts of Little Island offer sweeping views of the Hudson River, while other sections provide a panoramic view of downtown Manhattan and One World Trade Center.
These different viewpoints can be accessed by following the winding pathways sprinkled throughout the park.
Seating benches and bunches of greenery and flowers also line every walkway.
The park has over 350 species of foliage and flowers amounting to 114 trees and over 66,000 bulbs, according to the press release.
And now that it’s springtime, the flowers are in full bloom, creating a colorful park that contrasts the city’s grey, sometimes drab skyscrapers.
Now, let’s take a closer look at the different sections of the park.
The “Play Ground” serves as Little Island’s central point.
This is where you’ll find your typical park amenities, such food and drink options and seating under the shade.
The amphitheater – known aptly as the “Amph” – is located just a short walk away from the Play Ground towards the northwest end of the park.
One of the biggest changes from the original design of the park was the addition of this 687-seat amphitheater …
… and subsequently, the dressing rooms, prop areas, toilet facilities, and general manager’s office, according to Armstrong.
But the amphitheater isn’t the only public stage on Little Island.
There’s also a conjoined stage and lawn area known as the “Glade” on the opposite end of the park.
Yes, Little Island has two different stages, but that’s because the arts will be a cornerstone aspect of the park.
Starting June, the island will have four resident artists and events like concerts, dance, and theater six days a week.
“Little Island is going to spark inspiration for designers, engineers, general dreamers, and artists,” Armstrong said. “You’re experiencing the environment while you’re experiencing art.”
All of this likely wouldn’t have happened without the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation’s donation and work, according to Armstrong.
As a result, Armstrong hopes Little Island will encourage more private donations to public parks.
“We need private donations for public open space, and this just shows what you can do with private money, Armstrong said. “You can have a bit more control and flexibility to test methods, and that’s how you reach excellence.”
It’s been a turbulent two years for Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez.
In January 2019, the bombshell news broke that the Amazon CEO and his wife, MacKenzie, were getting a divorce after 25 years of marriage. Hours later, we learned that Bezos was in a relationship with Lauren Sanchez, a TV host and helicopter pilot who, along with her husband, had been friends with the Bezoses.
Despite a tumultuous few months that involved leaked texts, blackmail, a billion-dollar divorce, and maybe even interference from the Saudi Arabian government, Bezos and Sanchez are still going strong.
Now, Bezos has announced that he’s stepping down as Amazon CEO to become executive chairman and will hand the reins over to AWS CEO Andy Jassy.
Here’s how their relationship became public and how they’ve spent the last two years as a couple.
It all started on January 9, 2019. Shortly after 9 a.m., Jeff and his wife, MacKenzie, issued a joint statement on Twitter that they were divorcing.
“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 statement read. “If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again.”
MacKenzie is one of Amazon’s earliest employees. The couple has four children together.
Hours later, a second bombshell dropped: Bezos was in a relationship with Lauren Sanchez.
More recently, she’s worked as a helicopter pilot and founded her own aerial filming company in 2016 called Black Ops Aviation.
Sanchez has also had TV and film roles, including as the host of the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance” and playing an anchor in movies like “Fight Club” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” according to her IMDB page.
Bezos and Sanchez met through her then-husband, Patrick Whitesell, the co-CEO of WME, a Hollywood talent agency.
Sanchez and Whitesell had been married since 2005, but at the time the news broke, the couple had been separated since that fall, according to Page Six.
According to Brad Stone’s book “Amazon Unbound,” Sanchez and Bezos reconnected at an Amazon Studios party for the film “Manchester by the Sea” in 2016, though it’s unclear when their romance began.
In March 2018, Sanchez was invited to Amazon’s annual MARS conference in Palm Springs. One month later, they had dinner with Sanchez’s brother, Michael, in Los Angeles.
That July, Bezos hired Sanchez’s company to film footage for his rocket company, Blue Origin.
The National Enquirer said it had conducted a four-month investigation into Bezos and Sanchez’s relationship and had obtained texts and photos the couple had sent to each other.
The Enquirer said it had tracked the couple “across five states and 40,000 miles, tailed them in private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star hotel hideaways, intimate dinner dates and ‘quality time’ in hidden love nests.”
Page Six, which published the news a few hours before the Enquirer, reported that Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos knew that the Enquirer report was coming out and had timed their divorce announcement to get ahead of the news.
The gossip site also reported at the time that Bezos and Sanchez started dating after Jeff and MacKenzie had separated the previous fall, and that MacKenzie knew of the relationship.
The Enquirer said it had gotten its hands on “raunchy messages” and “erotic selfies,” including a text that reportedly read: “I love you, alive girl.”
The tabloid said it also had racy photos of Bezos, including one that was too explicit to print.
But according to Stone’s book, the tabloid never actually had a “below-the-belt selfie” of Bezos — it was a photo of someone else Michael Sanchez took from a male escort website and showed to the tabloid over FaceTime.
Almost immediately, questions arose about the Enquirer’s motives for investigating Bezos and Sanchez and the tabloid’s connection to President Trump.
A feud has simmered for years between Trump and Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, a frequent Trump target. The Enquirer’s publisher, AMI, is run by David Pecker, a longtime Trump ally.
By the end of January, The Daily Beast reported that Bezos was funding an investigation into who had leaked his private messages to the Enquirer. Bezos’ personal head of security, Gavin de Becker, headed up the investigation. De Becker said at the time that he thought the leaks were “politically motivated,” which AMI denied.
The investigation initially pointed to Michael Sanchez, Lauren’s brother and an outspoken Trump supporter, as the person who leaked the photos and texts, which Sanchez denied.
Then, in February, Bezos dropped a bombshell of his own: an explosive blog post titled “No thank you, Mr. Pecker,” in which he accused Pecker and AMI of trying to blackmail him.
Bezos wrote that the publisher had been threatening him with the publication of explicit photos he’d taken of himself unless he stopped investigating who was leaking his photos and texts to the tabloid.
AMI also demanded that Bezos no longer claim the publisher’s investigation into his personal life was influenced by political motivations, Bezos wrote.
As a result, Bezos published the emails he’d received from AMI.
“Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten,” Bezos wrote.
Bezos also hinted in the post that there may have been a link between the investigation into his relationship with Sanchez and the Saudi Arabian government — specifically, that he might have been a target of the Saudis because he owns the Washington Post, which provided “unrelenting coverage,” Bezos said, of the murder of its journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed by Saudi agents. The “Saudi angle” of Bezos’ own investigation into the leaks seemed to have “hit a particularly sensitive nerve” with Pecker, Bezos wrote.
Things quieted down for Bezos and Sanchez publicly for a few months, until April 2019, when Jeff and MacKenzie finalized the terms of their divorce.
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos both released statements on Twitter saying they had “finished the process of dissolving” their marriage and would be co-parenting their four kids.
MacKenzie said she was granting Jeff all her interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, as well as 75% of the Amazon stock they owned and voting control over the shares she retained. Her remaining stake in Amazon is estimated to be worth about $38 billion, placing her among the richest women in the world, according to Forbes.
One day later, Sanchez and Whitesell filed for divorce.
The Bezos divorce was finalized in July. A few days later, Bezos and Sanchez made their first public appearance as a couple at Wimbledon.
The couple were seated behind the royals at the men’s Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic at the All England Club.
A few months prior to Wimbledon, the couple had attended another exclusive event: the annual Allen & Company conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. There, they mingled with Warren Buffett, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg, according to Stone’s book.
The pair was spotted again in August on what appeared to be a fabulous European vacation: They were seen strolling through Saint-Tropez and cruising off the coast of Spain, in the Balearic Islands, aboard media mogul David Geffen’s superyacht, the Rising Sun.
Other guests reportedly included Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and the founder of Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner, along with his supermodel wife, Karlie Kloss.
Bezos and Sanchez were then seen on fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg’s sailing yacht off the coast of Italy. The couple appears to be close friends with von Furstenberg and her husband, IAC Chairman Barry Diller.
In December, Bezos reportedly threw Sanchez an elaborate 50th birthday celebration that included both a private dinner and a star-studded party attended by von Furstenberg and Diller, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, and Timothée Chalamet.
Around the holidays, the couple jetted off to French-speaking Caribbean island St. Barths, relaxing on yachts and meandering around the island with Sanchez’s son, Nikko Gonzalez.
Beginning in February 2020, Bezos was embroiled in a legal spat with Michael Sanchez, Lauren Sanchez’s brother.
Sanchez filed a defamation lawsuit against Bezos in February, claiming Bezos and his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, falsely accused him of providing Bezos’ nude photos to the National Enquirer. Sanchez claimed in the suit that Bezos told journalists he had handed over the images to the tabloid, but he says he never had the photos in his possession.
Bezos said in a court filing of his own that the suit amounted to “extortion” and directly threatened free speech. Bezos sought to dismiss Sanchez’s lawsuit under a California law that’s intended to protect against frivolous lawsuits.
A judge has since tossed Sanchez’s defamation suit, citing a lack of evidence. The judge later ordered Sanchez to pay $218,000 in legal fees for Bezos.
In the lawsuit, Sanchez used the word “fiancé” to describe Bezos’ relationship to Lauren Sanchez, implying that the couple is engaged.
“While Mr. de Becker’s initial asserted theory was that Mr. Sanchez had sold out his sister for $200,000, Mr. de Becker soon realized this theory would not hold up because, among other reasons, it was inconceivable that Mr. Sanchez would ruin his relationship with his sister and her current fiancé, the richest man in the world, for financial gain.”
Bezos isn’t described as Sanchez’s fiancé anywhere else in the suit, and Bezos and Sanchez have never confirmed that they’re engaged. In December, Page Six published photos of the couple on vacation, noting that Sanchez was wearing a large diamond ring on her right hand (engagement rings are worn on the left hand).
At the time lawyers for Michael Sanchez said in a statement, “Michael’s complaint speaks for itself.” Representatives for Bezos and Sanchez did not respond to requests for comment.
News broke in February 2020 that Bezos had reportedly purchased the Warner estate, a massive Beverly Hills compound, for $165 million. The purchase was the most expensive home sale in California history.
Prior to the sale, The New York Post reported that Bezos and Sanchez had been house-hunting in Los Angeles and touring mansions throughout the area for weeks.
The Warner estate was built by Hollywood mogul and Warner Bros. cofounder Jack Warner in 1937. It spans eight acres and is situated in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood of Beverly Hills. It’s an incredibly private property that’s surrounded by tall hedges, blocked off by a large gate, and completely hidden from view from the street.
The compound is home to multiple dwellings, including two guesthouses and a 13,600-square-foot mansion. The estate also features a pool, tennis court, and manicured gardens, as well as a nine-hole golf course and a “motor court” with its own garage and gas pumps, according to Architectural Digest.
Then, in July, Bezos appeared to make another purchase, this time right next door: a $10 million home that shares a hedge line with the Warner estate. According to property records viewed by both Variety and Daily Mail, Bezos is the new owner of the 1930s-era home on a side street in Beverly Hills’ Benedict Canyon neighborhood.
In February 2021, Bezos announced that he’ll step down as CEO of Amazon in the third quarter. Andy Jassy, the CEO of AWS, will take his place.
Cryptocurrencies are a “con,” the billionaire investor Barry Diller told CNBC on Friday. He voiced his distrust of the asset class that’s been dragged sharply lower this week largely on regulatory concerns.
The chairman of IAC, which runs internet and media brands including Care.com and The Daily Beast, initially balked at the question from “Squawk Box” about his thoughts on digital currency but quickly proceeded to answer.
“Yeah, absolutely,” he said as he confirmed his view that cryptocurrency is a con. “I watch some of the people that you have on and they talk about it – $40,000, $12,000, whatever. I think, ‘This is nutso talk,'” he said.
China’s statement, led by Vice Premier Liu He, threw off course bitcoin’s attempt to recover losses from its slide of more than 35% in a matter of days. A midweek sell-off was sparked after the People’s Bank of China said digital tokens couldn’t be used as a payment form by financial institutions. Other cryptocurrencies, including ether, the token of the ethereum blockchain, were also slammed lower in the wake of China’s regulatory threats.
Diller sat down with CNBC in an interview, during which he called this week’s merger plan between AT&T’s WarnerMedia and Discovery a “great escape” for AT&T.
Next week, IAC is set to spin off the video-hosting site Vimeo, whose shares are set to trade under the “VMEO” ticker on the Nasdaq starting Tuesday.
Online dating can be messy. The companies that run online dating can be messier.
Match Group, which started as one lonely Stanford Business School graduate’s attempt to build a less embarrassing way to find love online in the ’90s, has turned into a titan that owns nearly every US dating site.
College campus mainstay Tinder, serious relationship finder OkCupid, and Christian teen dating site Upward all belong to Match Group. Billionaire Barry Diller’s holding group IAC founded Match Group before it spun out the dating conglomerate last year.
Bumble, however, is conspicuously absent from Match’s portfolio. Bumble’s CEO, ex-Tinder executive Whitney Wolfe Herd, has a toxic history with the online dating group.
Ahead of Bumble’s entrance into Nasdaq, here’s the decades-long history into how Match Group became the owner of practically every online dating space in the country.
Match Group was founded in February 2009 after the holding company IAC decided to bundle all dating sites it owned. IAC’s initial purchase of Match.com dates back to the 1990s.
Stanford Business School graduate Gary Kremen founded Match.com in 1995 to design a meeting place for older professionals looking for long-term relationships, SF Gate reported.
But Kremen left Match.com in 1996 after butting heads with the firm’s investors. He walked away with just $50,000, Insider reported.
Ticketmaster Inc., which had recently been bought out by USA Networks Inc. (later renamed IAC), bought Match.com in 1999 for $50 million. Cendant Corporation bought the matchmaking upstart a year earlier for $6 million, per SF Gate.
During the 2000s, IAC chairman Barry Diller turned Match.com into one of the most successful online dating companies in the US.
Jim Safka, a former ETrade and AT&T executive, took over as Match.com CEO in 2004 after years of stalled growth.
Match had grow its subscriber base by 10% just a few months after Safka joined, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007, partially due to his emphasis on marketing to older demographics. Revenue increased 68% between 2003 and 2006, going from $185.3 million to $311.2 million, D Magazine reported.
During Safka’s leadership, Match became the one of best-performing companies in Diller’s portfolio, per D Magazine.
Barry Diller decided to form Match Group after breaking up IAC into five different companies in 2008.
Diller won a court battle to break up IAC into five companies: the Home Shopping Network; Ticketmaster; time-share company Interval; LendingTree; and IAC, which would include Match.com and Ask.com, per the NYT.
In February 2009, Match Group officially formed, as IAC set its sights on more dating platforms.
Diller acquired some of the hottest online dating sites in the years following his decision to splinter off Match Group.
IAC acquired People Media for $80 million in cash in July 2009, months after Match Group’s inception. Tech Crunch reported the deal included 27 targeted dating sites, including BlackPeopleMeet.com and SingleParentMeet.com, with a combined 255,000 subscribers.
In 2011, IAC’s Match Group announced another blockbuster acquisition of OkCupid for $50 million. OkCupid differed from other dating sites at the time by skipping the subscription-model and offering services free of charge. OkCupid, geared toward younger people, raised $6 million in funding prior to its acquisition, per TechCrunch.
Today, Match Group’s portfolio of apps includes:
Match, the company’s original app, which is available in 25 countries
Tinder, which lets users swipe through potential matches
Hinge, an app focused on finding relationships
POF (Plenty of Fish), one of the largest dating sites in Match’s portfolio and available in over 20 countries
OkCupid, which asks users multiple choice questions to determine compatibility
OurTime, a dating app for singles over 50
Meetic, which serves European countries
Pairs, which serves Asian countries
Upward, a Christian dating app for Gen Z and millennials
According to data from mobile analyst firm Sensor Tower, as of 2014, Match Group’s portfolio of apps saw an estimated 56 million installs globally. In the first three quarters of 2020, Match Group reached 82 million installs worldwide, an increase of roughly 46%.
The road to attaining what is essentially a monopoly on dating hasn’t been smooth, and it began with the birth of Tinder.
Match Group owns a sizable stake in the multibillion-dollar dating app industry, Vox reported, with a report from Apptopia estimating the company has cornered about 60% of the dating app market with its suite of apps.
Match Group has evaded antitrust investigation due in part to lax oversight by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, Evan Gilbert wrote in the NYU Law Review in 2019.
Monopolies are also “hard to prove,” and the FTC may not view Match Group as a big threat, Christopher Sagers, a professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, told Yahoo Finance.
In January 2012, Hatch Labs, a startup “sandbox” launched by IAC to incubate mobile apps, hired entrepreneur Sean Rad as general manager. During a Hatch Labs hackathon that February, Rad, who had been considering creating a dating product, worked with developer Joe Muñoz to create the prototype for Tinder.
Jonathan Badeen and Chris Gulczynski were hired soon after to help with front-end and design, respectively. Whitney Wolfe Herd was hired by Hatch Labs in May of that year and Justin Mateen was brought in as a contractor. The app was originally called Match Box.
By August 2012, what had been renamed “Tinder” launched on Apple’s App Store. In a few months, Tinder had made a million matches, mainly as a result of marketing heavily to fraternities and sororities on college campuses.
By April 2013, Tinder officially incorporated, with Rad, Badeen, and Mateen considered the company’s cofounders. Rad served as CEO.
IAC later purchased another chunk of Tinder for a reported $50 million from early Facebook employee and venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.
In 2014, Wolfe Herd, then Tinder’s vice president of marketing, sued Tinder and IAC for sexual harassment and discrimination. Wolfe Herd alleged that Mateen, her former boyfriend, harassed her while she worked for the company.
Wolfe Herd alleged that she had held the title of Tinder cofounder, which was later revoked. She also claimed in her suit that Mateen verbally harassed her following their breakup, and that Rad and Match.com CEO Sam Yagan did nothing about. Eventually, Wolfe Herd resigned.
After text messages between Wolfe Herd and Mateen were published as part of the suit, Mateen was suspended and ultimately resigned. In November 2014, the lawsuit was settled for an undisclosed sum, but reports from the time pegged it at “just over” $1 million.
Rad also decided to step down in the wake of the scandal and so IAC could find a more experienced CEO.
By 2015, Rad was back at the helm of Tinder, just as Match Group went public.
Match Group’s stock opened at $12 per share and the company raised roughly $400 million, on the low end of what it hoped to raise with the initial public offering.
The IPO came shortly after a bizarre interview with Rad in which he discussed his sex life. The article also mentioned Tinder’s number of users, which Rad wasn’t authorized to discuss on the eve of the IPO. (A quiet period prior to an IPO bars executives from publicly discussing certain matters.)
Match Group had to file an update with the Securities and Exchange Commission to clear up any confusion about Rad’s interview.
One year later, Rad became chairman of Tinder and Greg Blatt became Tinder’s CEO while simultaneously serving as CEO and chairman of Match Group. By 2017, Tinder had merged under the Match Group umbrella.
In 2018, Rad and nine other Tinder employees sued IAC, claiming IAC purposely undervalued the startup. The lawsuit sought $2 billion in damages.
The group, which included Badeen and Mateen, filed suit against both IAC and Match Group alleging that a lowball valuation was used to reduce the value of early employees’ and founders’ stock options.
When IAC merged Tinder with Match Group in 2017, the suit argued, Tinder employees’ options in the rapidly growing app were “stripped away,” leaving them with options in Match instead, which was less valuable.
The suit also argued that Blatt valued Tinder far lower than Tinder’s cofounders believed it to be worth. Additionally, Rosette Pambakian, Tinder’s vice president of marketing and communications, alleged that Blatt had groped her at a Tinder holiday party in 2016.
IAC sought to dismiss the suit, which a New York state appeals court rejected in 2019. IAC also counter-sued Rad for $400 million, alleging he had improperly recorded conversations with his superiors.
Starting in 2017, Match Group set its sights on another dating upstart: Hinge, an app focused on finding long-term connections.
Match took a share in the app that September, and in June 2018, acquired a 51% stake in the company.
From Match’s initial investment to the following year, Hinge saw a 400% increase in users, particularly on the East Coast of the US. Hinge, which had been described as the “anti-Tinder,” removed the swipe feature from its app and shifted to more fleshed-out user profiles with a goal of helping users find relationships.
By December 2019, IAC announced it was spinning off its stake in Match Group. “We’ve long said IAC is the ‘anti-conglomerate’ – we’re not empire builders,” Barry Diller, IAC’s chairman, said in a statement at the time.
“We’ve always separated out our businesses as they’ve grown in scale and maturity and soon Match Group, as the seventh spin-off, will join an impressive group of IAC progeny collectively worth $58 billion today,” Diller told CNBC in a statement.
By July 2020, IAC and Match Group completed their separation. IAC said that given Match’s market capitalization, it was the largest company IAC has separated in its history.
Match Group introduced four new board members, including actor Ryan Reynolds and Rupert Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi.
Match Group CEO of 14 years, Mandy Ginsberg, stepped down a year later.
Ginsberg said in a letter to employees she left for personal reasons, including undergoing a preventative double mastectomy and witnessing a tornado demolish her Dallas home.
Former Tinder COO Shar Dubey took over for Ginsberg, and became one of few women of color in chief executive roles at Fortune 500 firms.
Meanwhile, Wolfe Herd had been building a company of her own: Bumble, a dating app aiming to create a comfortable and empowering online dating space for women.
Wolfe Herd was reluctant to build another dating app after her experience at Tinder, but Andrey Andreev, the cofounder of dating app Badoo, convinced her. Along with two former Tinder employees — cofounder Chris Gulzcynski and former vice president of design Sarah Mick — they launched Bumble in December 2014.
Andreev made an initial investment of $10 million and became the majority owner with a 79% stake. Wolfe Herd became CEO with a 20% stake in Bumble, according to Forbes.
Bumble’s basic mechanisms worked like Tinder’s: Users could swipe right on someone they were interested in and swipe left on someone they weren’t, with one catch — only women had the ability to make contact first.
Wolfe Herd told Insider in 2015 that she wanted the app to empower women and feel more modern overall.
By the end of 2017, two years after launching, Bumble had amassed more than 22 million users. Match Group came calling.
According to a report from Forbes’ Clare O’Connor, Match Group offered $450 million for the startup sometime around June 2017, but Bumble rejected the offer.
The talks reportedly continued after that: in November of that year, both Forbes and TechCrunch reported that Match Group was still trying to buy Bumble at a $1 billion valuation.
But the spurned acquisition offer was the beginning of a soured relationship between Match Group and Tinder. In 2018, the companies sued each other, launching a heated legal battle that lasted for over two years.
In March 2018, Match Group filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Bumble, accusing the startup of copying Tinder’s technology, particularly its design and the process for matching users. The suit also alleged that Gulzcynski and Mick stole confidential information from Tinder.
A few weeks later, Bumble filed a $400 million lawsuit of its own, accusing Tinder of copying its core feature that required women to make the first move, which Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg had previously said Tinder was planning to introduce.
Bumble claimed in its suit that Match Group used the acquisition talks to improperly obtain proprietary information about the company and used the lawsuit to make Bumble look less attractive to other potential buyers.
The two companies reportedly tried, unsuccessfully, to settle. In September of that year, Bumble announced it was taking Match Group to court as well as preparing for an initial public offering.
In June 2020, Match Group and Bumble announced that they had settled all litigation between them. Details of the settlement weren’t disclosed, but both companies said they were “pleased with the amicable resolution.”
But Bumble has remained Match Group’s biggest competitor and has become a multibillion-dollar behemoth in its own right.
In late 2019, after reports of Badoo’s history of drug-fueled parties and sexist behavior, Badoo founder Andreev sold his entire stake in MagicLab, the umbrella company for Badoo and Bumble, to the Blackstone Group. The deal valued the company at $3 billion.
By July 2020, MagicLab was renamed Bumble and Wolfe Herd was named CEO of the whole company, overseeing 750 employees worldwide. Wolfe Herd has retained a 19% stake in the company.
In January 2021, Bumble filed to go public, revealing that it now has 42 million monthly users. Bloomberg reported that the company could seek a valuation of $6 billion to $8 billion.
Now, as the pandemic continues to keep much of the world locked down, singles are flocking to dating apps, helping fuel the growth of both Bumble and Match Group’s suite of apps.
Match Group reported better-than-expected third-quarter earnings last November, particularly when it came to Tinder: the company saw revenue growth and an increase in subscribers in the third quarter, despite the pandemic.
“Tinder remains the highest grossing app in the Lifestyle category in ~100 countries and has grown direct revenue from essentially zero in 2014 to an expected nearly $1.4 billion this year,” the company wrote in its letter to shareholders.
Match Group also reported in its third-quarter earnings that Hinge subscriptions were up 82% last year and revenue had grown more than 200% year-over-year.
For Bumble’s part, Wolfe Herd told CNN’s Poppy Harlow on the “Boss Files” podcast that there have been some advantages to dating app users during the pandemic.
“More genuine connections are forming out of this, and people are really, you know, being secure in who they’re meeting before that eventual physical meet-up ever begins,” Wolfe Herd said.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Elon Musk and Larry Ellison. Jeff Bezos and Barry Diller.
What do all these high-profile pairings have in common? They’re all close friendships within the world of tech.
Silicon Valley may be known for its competitive spirit, but it’s also fostered several years-long friendships among some of its most famous executives. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, for example, have been buddies for nearly 30 years. And Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff have been friends for decades, even though their respective enterprise software companies are technically rivals.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has several close pals in tech, including friends he’s defended online or taken for Tesla test drives.
Here’s a closer look at some of the friendships among tech CEOs.
Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey
While it’s not clear if Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey actually hang out in real life, they do seem to have a solid virtual friendship.
Then, in January, Dorsey and Musk spoke over video chat in front of Twitter employees, and Musk gave Dorsey advice on how to improve the platform.
In March, as Dorsey faced a possible ouster at the hands of an activist hedge fund, Musk publicly tweeted his support of the CEO.
“Just want to say that I support @jack as Twitter CEO,” Musk tweeted. “He has a good <3.”
Jeff Bezos and Barry Diller
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and IAC Chairman Barry Diller appear to have been friends for years.
In January 2016, Diller correctly predicted that Bezos would become the richest person in the world.
And in the last few years, as Bezos has gone through changes in his personal life, he’s been spotted hanging out with Diller and his wife, designer Diane von Furstenberg, more often. Diller and von Furstenberg have reportedly attended multipleparties hosted by Bezos, and Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez, have sailed aboard von Furstenberg’s yacht. The two couples were also reportedly spotted exploring Venice together.
Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs
Oracle founder Larry Ellison and late Apple CEO Steve Jobs were friends for 25 years before Jobs’ death in 2011.
Ellison and Jobs used to be neighbors in Woodside, California, and the pair often went hiking together. It was during one of those hikes that Ellison helped Jobs plot how to regain control of Apple after he was ousted — Ellison even suggested buying Apple himself and installing Jobs as CEO.
It was Jobs who came up with the idea that Apple should acquire his company, Next, instead. When Ellison questioned how the pair would make money, Jobs said to him, “Larry, this is why it’s so important that I’m your friend. You don’t need any more money,” Ellison said in a commencement speech in 2016.
Elon Musk has been friends with the cofounders of Google for a long time.
In the early days of Musk’s tenure at the electric car maker, he took Brin and Page on a test drive. Unfortunately, a software bug prevented the car from going any faster than 10 miles per hour, Musk recounted at a company shareholder meeting in 2016. Despite “the world’s worst demo,” however, the duo ended up investing in Tesla anyway, Musk said.
Over the years, Musk and Page especially have become close friends — Musk even sometimes sleeps at Page’s house when he’s in town, and Page once said he’d rather leave his money to Musk than give it away to charity.
“It’s fun for the three of us [including Google cofounder Sergey Brin] to talk about kind of crazy things, and we find stuff that eventually turns out to be real,” Page told Ashlee Vance, who wrote a 2015 biography about Musk.
Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff
Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff met when Benioff began working at Oracle when he was 23. He was a star early on, earning a “rookie of the year” award that same year and becoming Oracle’s youngest VP by age 26. He spent 13 years at Oracle, during which he became a trusted lieutenant to Ellison.
The pair became such close friends that rumors swirled about their relationship’s backstory — people wondered if they were related, or if Ellison had been Benioff’s childhood babysitter. Ellison and Benioff took trips together, sailed on Ellison’s yacht, and went on double dates.
Benioff began working on Salesforce with Ellison’s blessing, and Ellison became an investor, putting in $2 million early on.
The duo has publiclyfeuded over the years — including when Benioff fired Ellison from Salesforce’s board — but Benioff has also described Ellison as his mentor.
“There is no one I’ve learned more from than Larry Ellison,” Benioff said in 2013.
Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates met in 1991 when Buffett was invited over to Gates’ mother’s house. Neither man was very interested in meeting the other, but they ended up hitting it off. Soon after, Gates asked Buffett for a business book recommendation, and Buffett loaned him his copy of “Business Adventures” by John Brookes — Gates still has it today.
Since then, the duo has done everything from play table tennis together to participate in Berkshire Hathaway’s annual newspaper toss competition. And Gates, his wife Melinda, and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge together in 2010, vowing to give away the majority of their wealth in their lifetimes or in their wills.
Ellison and Musk appear to be two of the friendliest CEOs in tech, if their relationships with Benioff and Jobs, and Page, Brin, and Dorsey are any indication. So it’s not much of a surprise that the two moguls are “very close” friends with each other, too.
“I think Tesla has a lot of upside,” Ellison said at the time. “I am not sure how many people know, but I’m very close friends with Elon Musk, and I’m a big investor in Tesla.”
“[Zuckerberg’s] given me a lot of advice just on company scaling, how do you organize people, how do you set up these systems,” Houston told Bloomberg in 2015.
That same year, a Fast Company profile on Dropbox described Houston as a “close friend” of Zuckerberg’s. The pair has been photographed together everywhere from Houston’s birthday party at a ping-pong club to the prestigious Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
“Drew brings valuable perspective to our board as a leader of a technology company with services used by millions of people and businesses,” Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time. “He thinks deeply about where technology is going and how to build a culture that delivers services that always work well.”
Kevin Systrom and Jack Dorsey
Instagram founder Kevin Systrom and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey started out as close friends, but it’s hard to tell where they stand these days.
According to the book “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram” by Sarah Frier, the pair met when they were early employees at Odeo, the audio and video site created by eventual Twitter cofounders Ev Williams and Noah Glass. Dorsey expected to dislike Systrom when he joined as a summer intern in the mid-2000s, but the pair ended up bonding over photography and expensive coffee.
Systrom and Dorsey stayed in touch even after Systrom got a full-time job at Google — he was an early proponent of Twitter (then known as Twttr), and when Systrom was working on Burbn, the precursor to Instagram, he reached out to Dorsey for guidance. Dorsey ended up becoming an early investor, putting in $25,000. When Burbn pivoted to Instagram, Dorsey became one of the app’s biggest fans, cross-posting his Instagrams to Twitter and helping the app go viral soon after it launched. Dorsey eventually attempted to buy Instagram, but Systrom declined, saying he wanted to make Instagram too expensive to be acquired, according to Frier.
But the Dorsey-Systrom relationship appeared to have soured in 2012, when Dorsey found out through the grapevine that Instagram had signed a deal to be acquired by Facebook, Twitter’s biggest rival. According to Frier, Dorsey was hurt that Systrom hadn’t called him to discuss the deal, or to negotiate one with Twitter instead.
Dorsey hasn’t posted to his Instagram account since April 9, 2012, when he snapped a photo of an unusually empty San Francisco city bus — according to Frier, it was taken the morning he found out Instagram had sold.
In January 2019, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez were publicly outed as a couple the same day Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced their divorce.
The National Enquirer had been investigating Bezos and Sanchez for months and had obtained leaked photos and texts the couple had sent, including the now-famous message where Bezos called Sanchez “alive girl.”
In the 18 months since, both Bezos and Sanchez have finalized their respective divorces and have embarked on a whirlwind romance that’s taken them from Wimbledon to a yacht in St. Barths to the Taj Mahal.
It’s been a turbulent two years for Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez.
In January 2019, the bombshell news broke that the Amazon CEO and his wife, MacKenzie, were getting a divorce after 25 years of marriage. Hours later, we learned that Bezos was in a relationship with Lauren Sanchez, a TV host and helicopter pilot who, along with her husband, had been friends with the Bezoses.
Despite a tumultuous few months that involved leaked texts, blackmail, a billion-dollar divorce, and maybe even interference from the Saudi Arabian government, Bezos and Sanchez are still going strong.
Here’s how their relationship became public and how they’ve spent the 23 months as a couple.
It all started on January 9, 2019. Shortly after 9 a.m., Jeff and his wife, MacKenzie, issued a joint statement on Twitter that they were divorcing.
“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 statement read. “If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again.”
MacKenzie is one of Amazon’s earliest employees. The couple has four children together.
A mere few hours later, a second bombshell dropped: Bezos was in a relationship with Lauren Sanchez.
More recently, she’s worked as a helicopter pilot and founded her own aerial filming company in 2016 called Black Ops Aviation. Bezos has hired Sanchez’s company to film footage for his rocket company, Blue Origin.
Sanchez has also had TV and film roles, including as the host of the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance” and playing an anchor in movies like “Fight Club” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” according to her IMDB page.
At the time, Sanchez was married to Patrick Whitesell, the co-CEO of WME, a Hollywood talent agency.
Sanchez and Whitesell had been married since 2005, but at the time the news broke, the couple had been separated since the fall, according to Page Six.
The couple was friends with Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos because they had houses near each other in Seattle, Page Six reported.
The National Enquirer said it had conducted a four-month investigation into Bezos and Sanchez’s relationship and had obtained texts and photos the couple had sent to each other.
The Enquirer said it had tracked the couple “across five states and 40,000 miles, tailed them in private jets, swanky limos, helicopter rides, romantic hikes, five-star hotel hideaways, intimate dinner dates and ‘quality time’ in hidden love nests.”
Page Six, which published the news a few hours before the Enquirer, reported that Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos knew that the Enquirer report was coming out and had timed their divorce announcement to get ahead of the news.
The gossip site also reported at the time that Bezos and Sanchez started dating after Jeff and MacKenzie had separated the previous fall, and that MacKenzie knew of the relationship.
The Enquirer said it had gotten its hands on “raunchy messages” and “erotic selfies,” including a text that reportedly read: “I love you, alive girl.” The tabloid said it also had racy photos of both Bezos and Sanchez, including one that was too explicit to print.
Almost immediately, questions arose about the Enquirer’s motives for investigating Bezos and Sanchez and the tabloid’s connection to President Trump.
A feud has simmered for years between Trump and Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post, a frequent Trump target. The Enquirer’s publisher, AMI, is run by David Pecker, a longtime Trump ally.
By the end of January, The Daily Beast reported that Bezos was funding an investigation into who had leaked his private messages to the Enquirer. Bezos’ personal head of security, Gavin de Becker, headed up the investigation. De Becker said at the time that he thought the leaks were “politically motivated,” which AMI denied.
The investigation initially pointed to Michael Sanchez, Lauren’s brother and an outspoken Trump supporter, as the person who leaked the photos and texts, which Sanchez denied.
Then, in February, Bezos dropped a bombshell of his own: an explosive blog post titled “No thank you, Mr. Pecker,” in which he accused Pecker and AMI of trying to blackmail him.
Bezos wrote that the publisher had been threatening him with the publication of explicit photos he’d taken of himself unless he stopped investigating who was leaking his photos and texts to the tabloid.
AMI also demanded that Bezos no longer claim the publisher’s investigation into his personal life was influenced by political motivations, Bezos wrote.
As a result, Bezos published the emails he’d received from AMI.
“Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten,” Bezos wrote.
Bezos also hinted in the post that there may have been a link between the investigation into his relationship with Sanchez and the Saudi Arabian government — specifically, that he might have been a target of the Saudis because he owns the Washington Post, which provided “unrelenting coverage,” Bezos said, of the murder of its journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed by Saudi agents. The “Saudi angle” of Bezos’ own investigation into the leaks seemed to have “hit a particularly sensitive nerve” with Pecker, Bezos wrote.
Things quieted down for Bezos and Sanchez publicly for a few months, until April, when Jeff and MacKenzie finalized the terms of their divorce.
Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos both released statements on Twitter saying they had “finished the process of dissolving” their marriage and would be co-parenting their four kids.
MacKenzie said she was granting Jeff all her interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, as well as 75% of the Amazon stock they owned and voting control over the shares she retained. Her remaining stake in Amazon is estimated to be worth about $38 billion, placing her among the richest women in the world, according to Forbes.
One day later, Sanchez and Whitesell filed for divorce.
The Bezos divorce was finalized in July. A few days later, Bezos and Sanchez made their first public appearance as a couple at Wimbledon.
The couple was seated behind the royals at the men’s Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic at the All England Club.
The pair was spotted again in August on what appeared to be a fabulous European vacation: They were seen strolling through Saint-Tropez and cruising off the coast of Spain, in the Balearic Islands, aboard media mogul David Geffen’s superyacht, the Rising Sun.
Other guests reportedly included Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and the founder of Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner, along with his supermodel wife, Karlie Kloss. (The group was pictured in an Instagram post that has since been deleted.)
Bezos and Sanchez were then seen on fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg’s sailing yacht off the coast of Italy. The couple appears to be close friends with von Furstenberg and her husband, IAC Chairman Barry Diller.
In December, Bezos reportedly threw Sanchez an elaborate 50th birthday celebration that included both a private dinner and a star-studded party attended by von Furstenberg and Diller, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, and Timothée Chalamet.
Around the holidays, the couple jetted off to French-speaking Caribbean island St. Barths, relaxing on yachts and meandering around the island with Sanchez’s son, Nikko Gonzalez.
Since February, Bezos has been embroiled in a legal spat with Michael Sanchez, Lauren Sanchez’s brother.
Sanchez filed a defamation lawsuit against Bezos in February, claiming Bezos and his security consultant, Gavin de Becker, falsely accused him of providing Bezos’ nude photos to the National Enquirer. Sanchez claimed in the suit that Bezos told journalists he had handed over the images to the tabloid, but he says he never had the photos in his possession.
Bezos said in a court filing of his own that the suit amounted to “extortion” and directly threatened free speech. Bezos sought to dismiss Sanchez’s lawsuit under a California law that’s intended to protect against frivolous lawsuits.
“While Mr. de Becker’s initial asserted theory was that Mr. Sanchez had sold out his sister for $200,000, Mr. de Becker soon realized this theory would not hold up because, among other reasons, it was inconceivable that Mr. Sanchez would ruin his relationship with his sister and her current fiancé, the richest man in the world, for financial gain.”
Bezos isn’t described as Sanchez’s fiancé anywhere else in the suit, and Bezos and Sanchez have never confirmed that they’re engaged. In December, Page Six published photos of the couple on vacation, noting that Sanchez was wearing a large diamond ring on her right hand (engagement rings are worn on the left hand).
At the time lawyers for Michael Sanchez said in a statement, “Michael’s complaint speaks for itself.” Representatives for Bezos and Sanchez did not respond to requests for comment.
News broke in February that Bezos had reportedly purchased the Warner estate, a massive Beverly Hills compound, for $165 million. The purchase was the most expensive home sale in California history.
Prior to the sale, The New York Post reported that Bezos and Sanchez had been house-hunting in Los Angeles and touring mansions throughout the area for weeks.
The Warner estate was built by Hollywood mogul and Warner Bros. cofounder Jack Warner in 1937. It spans eight acres and is situated in the Benedict Canyon neighborhood of Beverly Hills. It’s an incredibly private property that’s surrounded by tall hedges, blocked off by a large gate, and completely hidden from view from the street.
The compound is home to multiple dwellings, including two guesthouses and a 13,600-square-foot mansion. The estate also features a pool, tennis court, and manicured gardens, as well as a nine-hole golf course and a “motor court” with its own garage and gas pumps, according to Architectural Digest.