[tomerv]

I think that's a common misunderstanding about who owns what in a marriage. I'll quote Matt Levine on this:

One thing that I find a little weird about the Bezos divorce is that there are a lot of claims that it will make MacKenzie Bezos “the world’s richest woman.” I suppose there is a technical sense in which that is right, but it assumes not only that she will have a right to half of Jeff Bezos’s assets in divorce, but also that she has no such right in marriage. That strikes me as a strange way to think about marriage, and about the “community property” laws that might give her half the assets in divorce. (Surely those laws imply that she is in a sense a joint owner now?) I would have thought the more straightforward analysis is that she is the world’s richest woman now, because she is a member of a married couple that has more money than any other single person or married couple on the planet, but I guess that is not how the scorekeeping works.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-10/bezos-...

[Dracophoenix]

This concept of marital property is speculative, if not fictional, unless both Jeff and Mackenzie made explicit agreements to co-own the shares during their marriage. Prior to their divorce, if Jeff wanted to dump all his Amazon stock, I doubt he needed MacKenzie's permission to do it. If he were deposed by the SEC over alleged claims of market manipulation with Amazon stock, Mackenzie would not be the one held liable. While she may have been able to influence his purchases/selloffs as one half of the world's now-formerly richest couple, she never had ownership of the stock as a legally-recognized property right in itself (and the liabilities the may come with such ownership). She now has such a right (although I would argue that she shouldn't) as a divorcée.

[dragonwriter]

> I would argue this concept of marital property is a fiction

Property is a social construct; marital property no more or less than any other, and likewise no more or less a fiction.

> . Prior to their divorce, if Jeff wanted to dump all his Amazon stock, I doubt he needed MacKenzie's permission to do it.

Yes, marriage is exactly like a general partnership in that, absent explicit agreement or special legal treatment of particular property, any partner can dispose of property of the partnership.

Also, like a general partnership in that the property legally ascribed to the partnership rather than partners individually is divided among the partners as personal property at dissolution.