Jeff Bezos handed over roughly 19.7 million Amazon shares. Harold Hamm wrote a cheque for $974,790,317.77. Neither man had signed a prenuptial agreement, and both of them could comfortably have afforded a lawyer to draft one.
The largest divorce bills in modern business turn on a calendar entry: the year of the wedding set against the year the company became worth something. Marry a man with a garage idea and you are a co-owner of whatever the idea becomes. Marry him after the IPO and the arithmetic is different, and so, usually, is the paperwork.
That is the whole mechanism behind every number below. None of these fortunes were split because somebody behaved badly. They were split because a couple built an asset during a marriage and never wrote down who owned what.
How is this list ranked, and what counts as a verified figure?
Cases are ranked by the size of the reported transfer, and they appear only where a named outlet or a court record both reports the figure and reports that no prenuptial agreement existed. Court judgments outrank reporting; reporting outranks estimate. Where terms were never officially disclosed, as with Mel Gibson, the number is flagged as reported rather than confirmed.
Two names that appear on every other list of this kind are missing. Alec and Jocelyn Wildenstein and Steve and Elaine Wynn circulate with large round numbers attached, but neither case has a settlement figure traceable to a court record or an outlet of record, so neither is ranked here. The Murdoch settlement appears further down with a caveat attached, because no named outlet has established whether Rupert and Anna Murdoch signed an agreement at all.
What did Jeff Bezos pay MacKenzie Scott without a prenup?
Bezos and Scott married in 1993, before Amazon existed in any form a divorce lawyer would recognise, and divorced in 2019 after 25 years. There was no prenuptial agreement. Scott received approximately 19.7 million Amazon shares, valued near $38 billion at the time, according to a settlement breakdown published by LawCompensate.
The detail that matters more than the headline figure is what Bezos kept. He retained 75 per cent of the couple’s joint Amazon stake, and, per the same breakdown, kept voting control over the 4 per cent that went to Scott. Fox News reported his net worth at $137 billion around the time the divorce was announced.
So the largest settlement ever recorded cost the richest man alive a quarter of his shares and none of his authority over the company. Scott walked away with a fortune and no vote, and proceeded to give enormous quantities of it away, which was arguably the more disruptive outcome for everyone concerned.
What did Bill Gates pay Melinda French Gates?
Gates and French Gates announced the end of their 27-year marriage in May 2021. They had no prenuptial agreement, and their assets were divided by a private separation agreement rather than in open court, which is why no money judgment or spousal support was ordered and why the figures emerged years later and sideways.
French Gates resigned as co-chair of the Gates Foundation in May 2024, leaving with $12.5 billion to commit to her own initiatives on behalf of women and families, a sum set under the terms of her agreement with her former husband. Then, in January 2026, GeekWire reported that Gates paid French Gates $7.88 billion as part of the settlement, a payout revealed in tax filings and first reported by The New York Times in its DealBook newsletter.
Worth noting what that sequence says about privacy. A separation agreement keeps the number out of the courthouse; it does not keep it out of a charitable return five years later. Yahoo reported Gates’s fortune at $130 billion at the time of filing; Forbes then had him thirteenth on its billionaire list at $108 billion.
What did Harold Hamm pay Sue Ann Arnall?
This is the most primary-sourceable number on the list, because it came from a bench. In November 2014, Oklahoma County Special Judge Howard Haralson ordered the Continental Resources founder to pay $995.5 million to his former wife, after a marriage of 26 years and a petition she filed in 2012. CNN reported Hamm’s fortune at an estimated $20.2 billion, according to Wealth-X.
The payment schedule was its own small opera. CNN reported that a third of the judgment would be paid by the end of the year, with the remaining $650 million arriving in instalments of at least $7 million a month. Hamm preferred to settle up at once. ABC News reported that Arnall initially spurned a cheque dated 5 January for $974,790,317.77, then had a change of heart and cashed it, while continuing to pursue an appeal she believed was worth more.
Through her lawyers, Arnall said she would not dismiss the appeal, and that accepting, in the interim, a small portion of an estate built over more than two decades should not deny her the right to pursue it. NBC News carried the statement in 2015, in which $974.8 million is the small portion. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed her appeal that year.
What did Mel Gibson’s divorce reportedly cost?
Gibson and Robyn Moore finalised their divorce in 2011 after more than 30 years of marriage. HELLO! magazine reported his net worth at around $900 million at the time and put the payout at roughly $425 million, on the basis that California law entitled Moore to an equal division of marital assets.
Treat that one as reported rather than established. The same report notes that the exact terms of the settlement were never officially disclosed, and that the couple had no prenuptial agreement, which is the single-source claim doing most of the work.
Should Rupert and Anna Murdoch be on a no-prenup list at all?
Not strictly, which is why they sit here as context rather than as a ranked entry. The Murdochs divorced on 8 June 1999, and CNBC reported that $1.7 billion of Rupert Murdoch’s fortune, including $110 million in cash, went to Anna. Whether the couple had signed anything beforehand has never been established by a named outlet, so the settlement cannot be ranked alongside Bezos or Hamm on the specific question of paperwork.
Anna Murdoch Mann, the mother of Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, died on 17 February 2026, aged 81. Of the money, she told The Australian Women’s Weekly that she was very comfortable, that her children were protected, and that this was really what she had been most anxious about. It remains the most sensible sentence any party to any of these settlements has said in public.
Where does Chip Wilson’s sealed BC case fit?
Nowhere yet, which is the reason to include it. Bloomberg reported that Chip Wilson, 71, the founder of Lululemon, and Shannon Wilson, 52, known as Summer, his wife since 2002, had told friends of their separation. A family-law case was filed in April 2026 in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. The file is sealed. No settlement figure exists, no allocation has been announced, and nothing about the reasons is on any record a reader can consult.
What is public is the shape of the estate. Billionaires.Africa reports that Wilson owns about 8.6 per cent of Lululemon, worth roughly $1 billion, and that Shannon Wilson owns about 1 per cent. Moneywise puts his holdings at a stake of roughly 8.7 per cent in Lululemon plus a position of about $3 billion in Amer Sports, the parent of Arc’teryx and Salomon, alongside a property portfolio that includes one of British Columbia’s most valuable homes. Bloomberg values the overall fortune at $6.1 billion.
The couple reportedly never signed a prenuptial agreement. Neither side has said how anything will be divided, and in the absence of an agreement, British Columbia’s family property rules apply to what was accumulated during the marriage. Shannon Wilson was one of Lululemon’s earliest hires and its founding lead designer, credited by her husband with a large part of the company’s growth, and later founded the retail brand Kit and Ace. She was also, separately, there for the part of the story the share register records.
Chip Wilson spent the first half of 2026 fighting his own board, launching a proxy contest and settling in May with two of his nominees seated. He remains the company’s second-largest shareholder.
Does signing a prenup actually change the arithmetic?
It changes what a court is asked to decide, which is not the same as changing what a marriage produced. The absence of an agreement is why Scott’s shares, French Gates’s tranches and Hamm’s cheque exist as public numbers at all; a separation agreement, as the Gates settlement showed, moves the figure out of the courtroom but not necessarily out of the record. The reporting around Bezos’s 2025 remarriage to Lauren Sánchez focused on precisely this lesson, with inkl describing a new prenuptial agreement as ironclad. Fortunes get divided by documents drafted long before anyone is in the mood, as the Del Vecchio heirs have also discovered.
The obvious follow-up is what Chip Wilson will pay, and the honest answer is that nobody outside the file knows. The case is sealed, no figure has been announced, and anything circulating is guesswork. The only numbers on the record are the ones he already owns: about 8.7 per cent of Lululemon and roughly $3 billion of Amer Sports.
Cover photograph via Elle.
