Bezos’ ex-wife donates $1.7 bn to charities

Our Correspondent

MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon.com’s billionaire chief executive Jeff Bezos, has donated $1.7 billion of her wealth in the past year to causes including racial equality, LGBTQ rights, public health, economic mobility, empathy & bridging Divides, functional democracy and climate change, she said in a blog post on July 28.

Ms. Scott, who was previously known as MacKenzie Bezos, also announced her new last name, which she said was taken from her middle name. Last year, she signed the Giving Pledge in a commitment to donate the majority of her fortune after her split from Bezos – the world’s richest man – left her with a 4 per cent stake in Amazon.

“Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror,” she wrote in a post on Medium.

“I began work to complete my pledge with the belief that my life had yielded two assets that could be of particular value to others: the money these systems helped deliver to me, and a conviction that people who have experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions. Last fall, I asked a team of non-profit advisors with key representation from historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups to help me find and assess organizations having major impact on a variety of causes. Though this work is ongoing and will last for years, I’m posting an update today because my own reflection after recent events revealed a dividend of privilege I’d been overlooking: the attention I can call to organisations and leaders driving change,” she wrote in Medium.

At the time of the divorce, her stake was worth about $36 billion. Her fortune has grown to over $60 billion with a jump in Amazon’s shares this year.

Scott made her announcement a day before Jeff Bezos was to appear for his first-ever Congressional testimony in front of an antitrust panel, which has been investigating how Amazon has used its market power to hurt smaller rivals.
It was reported lately that Mr Bezos’ had broken his own personal net worth record after his fortune passed $171 billion, amid a boom in sales during the pandemic.