MacKenzie Scott: ex-wife of Jeff Bezos gives away $4bn in four months

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, has donated more than $4bn in the past four months to hundreds of charities and aid organisations, including food banks fighting the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Scott, who has a personal net worth of more than $60bn (£44.5bn), pledged to give away much of her wealth after her divorce settlement with Bezos last year.

In July, Scott said she had donated $1.7bn to 116 charities. On Tuesday, the 50-year-old said she had decided to “accelerate” her donation strategy this year, and in the past four months has given a further $4.15bn to 384 organisations across the US and Puerto Rico, taking her total donations this year to $6bn.

“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” she wrote in a blogpost titled 384 Ways to Help. “Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of colour, and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires.”

Bezos, who was married to MacKenzie for 26 years, is the world’s wealthiest person, with a fortune estimated at $182bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

MacKenzie said she took a “data-driven” approach to selecting the recipients of donations. However, her team paid “special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital”.

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She added that some of her donations aimed to fulfil basic needs, such as food banks, emergency relief funds and support for the most vulnerable. Others focused on long-term issues that the pandemic has exacerbated, such as debt relief, employment training and education for “historically marginalised and underserved people”, as well as civil rights groups and legal defence funds.

In total, her team looked at 6,490 organisations and put 822 into “deeper research”.

This year, Bezos has committed $10bn to issues related to climate change. In November, he announced the first of those grants, handing out almost $800m to 16 groups.