MacKenzie Scott just revealed she’s donated a whopping near $2bn to various causes on the very same day her ex Jeff Bezos announced he is struggling to give away his $124bn fortune.
On Monday, Scott shared in a Medium blog post that she’d doled out “$1,990,800,000 to 343 organizations supporting the voices and opportunities of people from underserved communities.”
“The funds we picked look for teams with lived experience in the issues they’re addressing, as we did when selecting the other non-profits in this giving cycle, and the 1,200+ recipients before them, many of which are also funds. You can learn more about any of them in the database we’ll be releasing soon, with information supplied by their own teams, and mission statements in their own words,” Scott wrote in her post, which noted that she made the donations with the help of her team.
Some of the funds included are American Association of People with Disabilities, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, Freedom Prep Charter Schools, and many more.
The announcement coincided with Bezos doing an interview with CNN alongside his new wife, Lauren Sánchez, where he said they were “building the capacity to be able to give away this money.”
“The hard part is figuring out how to do it in a levered way,” Mr Bezos said. “Building Amazon was not easy. It took a lot of hard work and very smart teammates. And I’m finding - and Lauren’s finding - that philanthropy is very similar. It’s not easy. It’s really hard.”
The revelation of Scott’s latest donations also coincided with reporting from the New York Times that says Amazon is planning to cut up to 10,000 staffers will be cut from Amazon’s devices organisation, retail division and human resources.
Scott, who was married to Bezos for 25 years when they announced their 2019 divorce, rarely makes public appearances or does interviews, but does offer semi-yearly philanthropy updates -- like this one -- to her Medium page.
At the time of Scott and Bezos’ divorce, they reached a settlement that gave her “a four percent stake in Amazon, valued at $38.3 billion at the time,” per Forbes.
The publication also noted that while Bezos has donated more than $2.4bn to philanthropic causes in his lifetime, Scott “has given away five times more than him—$12.8 billion—in a little over two years.”
