The announcement came after tabloid magazine National Enquirer published 11 pages of images of Jeff and his alleged new partner, television journalist and helicopter pilot Lauren Sanchez. The scoop was served alongside transcripts of sexts and, because this is 2019, a rumoured cache of d*ck pics.

It also came with a raft of headlines crowing over what would come next for the couple worth £107b ($137 billion). “How much will Jeff Bezos’ divorce cost the world’s richest man?” Yahoo demanded to know. “Jeff Bezos… now braced for record $137 billion divorce,” The Daily Beast exhaled. “What could possible go wrong?” “No prenup, $67b on the line,” Fox News crowed. “MacKenzie could fetch as much as $66 billion,” Page Six reported, as if the Bezos marriage was a prize cow going into auction. As CNBC put it, the Bezos divorce could be “the most expensive” in history. Expensive as in an expense for Jeff. Not the fair and adequate division of assets acquired over the course of a marriage that lasted 25 years.

The subtext was clear: Jeff was stupid enough to get married without a prenup and the couple live in an American state where marital assets are split equally down the middle in the event of a divorce. So now his calculating wife is going to take him to the cleaners. As Donald Trump – who has long loathed Jeff for his ownership of liberal newspaper The Washington Post –put it when asked about the divorce: “Well, I wish him luck. It’s going to be a beauty.”

The problem with the media’s portrayal of the ‘world’s most expensive divorce’