Craig McCaw's ex-wife took about $460 million, mostly in Nextel stock, and bought a California newspaper with it

Craig McCaw built McCaw Cellular and sold it to AT&T in 1994 for about $11.5 billion^†. He and Wendy McCaw separated in early 1995 after 21 years of marriage, when his fortune was more than $1 billion. The Seattle Times called it the largest divorce case in Washington State history. The 1997 settlement was reported at about $460 million, most of it in Nextel stock; one report put it at $463 million in stock plus $19 million in real estate. In 2000 Wendy McCaw used the money to buy the Santa Barbara News-Press, one of California's oldest newspapers, from The New York Times for about $100 million. In 2006 most of the paper's senior editors quit in a dispute over her management^†. The News-Press filed for bankruptcy on July 21, 2023. The Globe and Mail later corrected an article that had called the McCaw settlement the largest in US history, saying it was one of the largest.