MacKenzie Scott’s Remarkable Giveaway Is Transforming the Bezos Fortune

Bezos tells a television interviewer what he thinks about the Giving Pledge, a commitment by billionaires to give away the majority of their fortunes. He says he’s not ready to share his ideas on charity. “The pledge is an interesting idea. For me the most important thing is to figure out where—which models work the best. So for one thing, I’m convinced that in many cases for-profit models improve the world more than philanthropy models if they can be made to work.”

One world-changing for-profit project on his mind: space exploration and colonization. He’s spent years building private rocket maker Blue Origin LLC.

“Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” Bezos says in an Instagram post, promising $10 billion to start what he’s calling the Bezos Earth Fund. Without elaborating on details, he says he’ll fund scientists, activists, and nongovernmental organizations. At the time of the announcement, none of the money had been put to work yet.

Compared with other environmental gifts, Bezos’ commitment is huge. The ClimateWorks Foundation estimates that less than 2% of global giving, about $5 billion to $9 billion, goes to climate-related causes each year. Nonetheless, “$10 billion is not going to solve climate change,” says Bruce Usher, a Columbia business professor who’s co-director of the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise. Bezos “is going to have to focus on specific barriers that he thinks he can unlock.”

Many on the left of the environmental movement are wary about the announcement. “The Earth Fund announcement is a pretty clear attempt at greenwashing—a way of distracting from what he’s actually accountable for, which is his own business practices,” says Matthew Miles Goodrich, fundraising director for the Sunrise Movement. Critics and employees alike often point to Amazon’s high-speed delivery and excessive packaging as major contributions to climate change. (The company has made a commitment to go carbon neutral by 2040.) Others point to the tangled issues of inequality and climate change. Despite Amazon having a relatively high starting wage, many warehouse employees depend on food stamps or are even homeless. “We encourage anyone to compare our median pay and benefits to other retailers,” says an Amazon spokeswoman, citing the company’s health and retirement benefits. Labor groups are pushing, so far without success, to unionize its workers.

If Bezos’ goal is to end climate change, “he probably could,” says Dale. “The question is, with an undertaking such as that, how much time, how much effort does he want to put behind his giving? And so far he’s really trusted established organizations to carry out that work for him, so he’s not offering a new idea or a new solution.”

Scott announces that over the past several months she’s given away a total of $1.7 billion to 116 different organizations with a wide range of focus areas, from racial equity to LGBTQ rights. Scott initially intended to keep her giving private, according to two people whose organizations received gifts. “I was completely prohibited from telling anybody who the donor was,” says Eliza Byard, executive director of GLSEN, an organization that supports LGBTQ students. “I wasn’t even in a position to tell my board who this person was.”

According to her blog post on Medium, Scott decided to share what work she’d been doing in part as a response to the events of “the first half of 2020,” an apparent reference to both Covid and police violence against Black people that inspired nationwide protests. “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,” she wrote.

Philanthropy experts are impressed. Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, notes that cash went directly to charities, rather than sitting in a foundation. “The money hit the street,” he says.

Scott also seems to have absorbed a common critique of philanthropy, that it often involves a few wealthy White donors telling the rest of the world what to do and taking their time to decide where to give. “You’ve got to trust people who are on the ground doing this work,” says Edgar Villanueva, founder of the Decolonizing Wealth Project, whose Liberated Capital fund tries to steer dollars to promoting racial equity. “People often say it’s hard to give billions of dollars,” Villanueva says. Scott’s donation “weakens the case that giving away billions of dollars is difficult. It shows it can be done.”

Her gifts were unrestricted. “That says, ‘We trust in the leadership of the organization, and we believe in your programs and know that you will use this support to continue fulfilling your mission,’ ” says Jorge Valencia, executive director and CEO of the Point Foundation, an organization that supports LGBTQ students and received money from Scott in June.

Bezos schedules calls with environmental leaders, often joined on the phone by his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez. “He told me he was just learning, and he was very humble,” says Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund. But it’s clear, based on his questions, that “he knew a lot” about climate change, Krupp says. “He was already laser-focused on wanting to make sure his contribution had maximum impact.”

Bezos and Sanchez also speak to Gloria Walton, the CEO and president of the Solutions Project, an environmental justice group that funds community activism led mostly by women of color. “He said he didn’t know much about climate and said he wanted to listen and hear what I wanted to say—and I had a lot to say,” Walton says. She tries to persuade him to expand his giving beyond the large environmental organizations that “always get funded” and think about other nonprofits that represent disadvantaged groups.

“My challenge to him was really to disrupt the status quo,” she says. “Racial justice is not an add-on.” One more issue, she tells Bezos: Many of the communities she works with have a “complex relationship with him and Amazon,” so any funding couldn’t come with strings attached that might limit activists’ work.

Bezos announces the first round of grants from his Earth Fund, spreading $791 million across 16 organizations. Most recipients are traditional environmental charities. The ClimateWorks Foundation will use $50 million to push for zero-emission trucks and shipping and climate-friendly cement and steel. The Environmental Defense Fund gets $100 million for launching a satellite in 2022 to monitor methane emissions, as well as creating standards for natural solutions to climate change. The Nature Conservancy, Natural Resources Defense Council, World Resources Institute, and World Wildlife Fund also get donations.

A fifth of the total, $151 million, goes to five environmental justice groups, including $43 million for the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund, which gives money to community organizations serving people of color, and $12 million for NDN Collective, a South Dakota-based group focused on indigenous people.

Walton’s nonprofit, the Solutions Project, ends up receiving $43 million to redistribute to front-line organizations across the country, a huge haul for a group that gave just $700,000 in grants in 2019. Bezos places no restriction on the money, as she requested. “That’s a hard thing to do, but he must know it’s the right thing to do,” Walton says.

The grants mean Bezos is effectively funding some of his critics. “We give a nod to Bezos Earth Fund for rightfully shifting power and investing into sustainable solutions,” NDN President and CEO Nick Tilsen wrote in a blog post. But he added that “we will not tiptoe around” the fact that Amazon and Bezos have been criticized for their labor and climate records.

At the time Bezos first announced his $10 billion commitment, his net worth was $132 billion. As of Nov. 30, around the time these first grants are announced, his net worth is $186 billion. He made $54 billion in the time it took him to donate this $791 million to climate issues.

Scott announces that over the past four months she’s given away about $4.2 billion, setting an unprecedented pace for giving. On Medium, Scott says she asked her team to figure out how to give away her money faster.

Since she signed the Giving Pledge, her fortune has grown so fast that the goal posts have shifted: To give away half her fortune, she now needs to donate about $30 billion.

Seventeen historically Black colleges receive a total of $410 million from Scott, on top of $150 million she gave to six such schools in July. Her surprise gifts in December, ranging from $4 million to $50 million, were the largest individual donation in each of the recipients’ histories. “This gift is transformational,” says Dwaun Warmack, president of 151-year-old Claflin University. Scott’s $20 million gift will be used to expand scholarships, beef up academics, build up its endowment, and refresh the school’s aging campus.

Bezos announces he’s appointing a new Amazon CEO and will become executive chairman. In a letter to employees, he wrote: “I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day One Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.”

Bezos hasn’t said when the next round of climate funding would arrive—despite the urgency of the problem. “It’s really a race against time,” Columbia’s Usher says. “That’s where Jeff Bezos’ money can make a difference. That kind of funding can be focused on buying us time.” Scott also hasn’t made clear what she’ll be doing next. “What they share is a disinclination to be transparent,” says Rob Reich, a political science professor at Stanford who studies philanthropy. “We deserve some transparency into their plans, so we can scrutinize the exercise of their power.”