Fascination leaps like California wildfire over the just-disclosed divorce that’s pending between Amazon co-founders Jeff Bezos and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie.

Why all the attention? Here are several thoughts.

First, as the world’s wealthiest couple is worth a reported $137 billion, and with no prenuptial agreement, the divorce proceedings might settle once and for all the contention that money can’t buy happiness.

The celebrity gossip channel TMZ reports that without a prenup, the settlement likely will be right down the middle — meaning MacKenzie Bezos is as much a rightful owner of Amazons assets as her husband. This is the only just conclusion.

Any married couple who has built their own business will attest to the fact that Jeff Bezos did not build Amazon alone. Bezos himself acknowledges that MacKenzie was Amazon’s first employee. For legal purposes the company lists him as the founder and her as an employee. But neither of them built Amazon on their own, and neither would have been likely to.

Some will argue that the Bezos divorce is a personal matter that should remain private. That’s not a realistic assessment. The company they founded now owns the Washington Post, which has a unique Fourth-Estate role and relationship with the federal government and political arena. Amazon’s multitude of government contracts include massive deals for secure cloud data storage with the Pentagon, CIA and other agencies. Amazon has shared customer data with the National Security Agency since the George W. Bush administration, according to allegations by Edward Snowden and other government whistle blowers.

Will these details of potential national security and national security policy be allowed to surface in the court divorce proceeding? A more serious question might be whether the Bezos proceedings deserve special treatment because of such questions. Special treatment for the world’s wealthiest couple seems patently unfair to the rest of us.

Amazon has irreversibly changed the way America shops and ships. What started as an online bookstore 25 years ago is now the premier online sales, shipping and data storage conglomerate on the planet. A divorce of its principals is tantamount to a division of a corporate empire, or a national split akin to East and West Germany or North and South Korea. It might not signal the beginning of the end of Amazon. Maybe it’s the end of the beginning. Regardless, it’s hard to consider it a private matter