The billionaire Jeff Bezosfounder Amazon announced in an interview with the network “CNN“On his intentions to donate most of his wealth to charity, which is currently estimated at 124 billion dollars. Bezos did not exaggerate the details in his announcement and has already been criticized for not signing the pledge of giving founded by bill Gates and-Warren Buffett In 2010, hundreds of the world’s richest people have so far signed it, pledging to donate most of their wealth to charity.
Bezos said he and his partner, Lauren Sanchez, agreed to do an interview together for the first time since they started dating in 2019 to help make headlines for the Bezos Courage and Civility Award, which was given this year to musician Dolly Parton. As part of the award Parton received a grant of 100 million dollars, which she will have to donate to charity.
The couple’s biggest challenge may be how to divide Bezos’s vast fortune. Founder Amazon He refused to provide concrete details on where and how much he is expected to donate. Despite being the fourth richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos refrained from setting a target amount that he plans to donate during his lifetime.
“The hard part is figuring out how to do it in a leveraged way,” Bezos says in the interview, hinting that although he intends to contribute a significant portion of the capital he has accumulated, he is still looking to maximize his return. “It’s not easy. Building Amazon wasn’t easy. It took a lot of hard work, a bunch of very smart team members, hard-working team members, and I find — and I think Lauren agrees with me on this — that charity, philanthropy, is a lot like that. There’s a lot of ways that lead to ineffective things. So you have to think about it carefully and you have to have brilliant people in the team.”
Bezos’ goals
Bezos committed $10 billion over 10 years, about 8% of his current net worth, to the Bezos Earth Foundation, which Sanchez heads. The fund’s priorities include goals such as reducing the carbon footprint of construction-grade cement and steel; pushing financial regulators to consider climate-related risks; Advancing data and mapping technologies for monitoring carbon emissions; and building natural plant-based carbon sinks on a large scale.
Bezos’ approach to donations stands in stark contrast to that of his ex-wife, philanthropist Mackenzie Scott, who recently distributed nearly $4 billion to 465 organizations in less than a year.
A signatory to the Gates and Buffett Giving Charter, Scott supports organizations that advance the needs of underrepresented groups in the areas of education, climate change and criminal justice. Earlier this year, it donated $436 million to Habitat for Humanity, which will use a portion of the donation to increase the amount of affordable housing in minority communities. Last May, Scott donated about 122 million dollars to the youth mentoring organization “Big Brothers Big Sisters of America”.