Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has donated $1.7 billion of her wealth to different causes, including racial equality, LGBTQ rights, public health and climate change, she revealed in a blog post.
“Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror,” she wrote.
“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,” she continued.
“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 organizations and leaders driving change,” the 50-year-old novelist added.
In her blog post, Scott has listed a total of 116 organizations that she has donated to. She also broke down how much she has donated to various causes by category, the top three causes Scott donated to were: racial equity ($587 million), economic mobility ($400 millon), and gender equity ($133 million).
Scott and Bezos divorced last year after 25 years of marriage, leaving her with a fortune of about $36 billion and making her the 13th-richest person in the world. Since then, her fortune has grown to more than $60 billion with a jump in Amazon’s shares this year. Bezos’ fortune has also skyrocketed.
MacKenzie Scott had joined the Giving Pledge – a list of billionaires who pledge to donate half of their fortune to those in need last year following her divorce. the Giving Pledge was started by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates in 2019.