MacKenzie Scott, Ex-Wife of Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Gave Away More Than $4 billion Over the Last 4 months to Help Those Affected Economically by the Pandemic The organizations range from food banks to emergency relief funds, as Scott sought to give 'immediate support to people suffering the economic effects' of the pandemic, and gave funds to organizations that have 'dedicated their lives to helping others.'
This story originally appeared on Business Insider
MacKenzie Scott, one of the world's richest women and the ex-wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has announced that she's given away nearly $4.2 billion to 384 organizations across the US in the past four months.
The news comes as she continues her quest to give away much of her wealth since her $38 billion divorce settlement with Bezos.
In a new Medium post, Scott, who has a net worth topping $60 billion, announced the nearly $4.2 billion in donations to organizations ranging from food banks to emergency relief funds. The news comes after announcing back in July that she'd already given $1.7 billion to 114 organizations over the past year.
Scott wrote in her latest blog post that after her post in July, she asked a "team of advisors" to help her as she sought to give immediate support to those being affected by the economic crisis related to the pandemic.
"They took a data-driven approach to identifying organizations with strong leadership teams and results, with special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital," Scott wrote in her post.
"These 384 carefully selected teams have dedicated their lives to helping others, working and volunteering and serving real people face-to-face at bedsides and tables, in prisons and courtrooms and classrooms, on streets and hospital wards and hotlines and frontlines of all types and sizes, day after day after day."
Scott continued, writing that she was "far from completing" her pledge but encouraged others to donate a gift to "one of the thousands of organizations doing remarkable work all across the country."
As reported by Business Insider, the world's richest have seen their net worths skyrocket by nearly $1 trillion amid the pandemic. Scott is no exception, with Bloomberg reporting that her wealth increased by $23.6 billion this year, primarily due to her shares in Amazon, which saw a surge.
Chuck Collins, the director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, endorsed Scott's latest donation. "MacKenzie Scott's bold and direct giving puts shame to the billionaire class and their perpetual private foundations," he said in a statement.
"During a pandemic when US billionaire wealth has increased $1 trillion since March, other billionaires should draw inspiration from her approach to move funds to urgent needs, to historically marginalized groups, to share decision-making with non-wealthy people, and to avoid warehousing funds in private legacy foundations."
