ex-wife of Jeff Bezos offers absent $4bn in 4 months

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MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, has donated much more than $4bn in the past four months

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-spouse of the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, has donated a lot more than $4bn in the earlier 4 months to hundreds of charities and assist organisations, including meals banking companies combating the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Scott, who has a individual net well worth of a lot more than $60bn (£44.5bn), pledged to give absent a great deal of her prosperity right after her divorce settlement with Bezos last calendar year.

In July, Scott claimed she experienced donated $1.7bn to 116 charities. On Tuesday, she mentioned she experienced resolved to “accelerate” her donation technique this 12 months, and in the past 4 months has offered a further more $4.15bn to 384 organisations across the US and Puerto Rico, taking her whole donations this year to $6bn.

“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Us citizens now struggling,” she wrote in a blogpost titled 384 Methods to Support. “Economic losses and health and fitness outcomes alike have been worse for females, for people of colour, and for people today dwelling in poverty. In the meantime, it has substantially increased the prosperity of billionaires.”

Bezos, who had been married to MacKenzie for 26 yrs, is the world’s wealthiest person, with a fortune believed at $182bn, in accordance to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

MacKenzie explained she took a “data-driven” solution to deciding on the recipients of donations. However, her workforce paid out “special awareness to these working in communities facing superior projected meals insecurity, superior measures of racial inequity, large regional poverty rates, and minimal entry to philanthropic capital”.

She additional that some of her donations aimed to fulfil essential wants, this kind of as meals banking institutions, unexpected emergency reduction cash and assistance for the most susceptible. Other folks focused on extended-time period concerns that the pandemic has exacerbated, this kind of as credit card debt reduction, employment training and schooling for “historically marginalised and underserved people”, as well as civil legal rights teams and authorized defence money.

In full, her staff looked at 6,490 organisations and set 822 into “deeper research”.

This 12 months, Bezos has committed $10bn to problems linked to weather alter. In November, he announced the initially of those grants, handing out nearly $800m to 16 groups.