Jeff Bezos has a history of resisting the billionaire-giving trend. He is one of the wealthiest and most well-known billionaires who has not signed the Giving Pledge, a Warren Buffett and Bill Gates declaration that the ultra-wealthy will donate most of their fortunes to the causes of their choice.
And until today, his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott had a clear advantage over him in the charitable stakes. Thankfully, the creator of Amazon is altering his mind. On Monday, Jeff Bezos revealed he plans to donate most of his $127 billion fortune to numerous initiatives that will benefit the world.
Bezos was subsequently questioned about his plans to donate this money while still alive. Jeff’s brief but lovely response was, “Yeah, I do.”
Image source: Theladders
Bezos committed his fiancée Lauren Sanchez, and he currently claims to be working on “creating the capability to be able to give away this money,” which is a more complex process than it initially appears. Bezos compared the approach to the one that went into making Amazon into such a sizable, globally renowned business, saying that he is aiming to maximize the good his money can do:
“The hard part is figuring out how to do it in a levered way…It’s not easy. Building Amazon was not easy. It took a lot of hard work, a bunch of brilliant teammates, hard-working teammates, and I’m finding — and I think Lauren is finding the same thing — that charity and philanthropy are very similar…There are a bunch of ways that I think you could do useless things, too…So you have to think about it carefully and have brilliant people on the team.”
During the conversation, Bezos avoided saying which charities or causes would benefit from his money. But given that he has already committed $10 billion to his own Bezos Earth Fund over ten years, it’s probable that the environment will be one of the main targets of Bezos’s new charitable obsession. In addition, Bezos and Sánchez recently presented Dolly Parton with a $100 million gift as part of the Courage and Civility Award, which they have already granted to CNN’s Van Jones and chef Jose Andrés.
