Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife Mackenzie Scott donates $1.7BILLION to charity since splitting from the Amazon billionaire
THE ex-wife of , MacKenzie Scott, has donated $1.7 billion of her wealth since her split with the Amazon CEO.
Scott, who divorced Bezos in 2019, has a net worth of more than $60 billion, but has given away money to a number of causes including climate change, racial inequality and public health.
, Scott wrote that she had pledged to give the majority of her wealth "back to the society that helped generate it".
"Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror," she continued.
Scott said she had recruited a team of non-profit advisors to help her find and assess organizations that were having "major impact" on a variety of causes.
"Though this work is ongoing and will last for years," she continued, "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."
Scott then listed the total amount she had given to date, which included more than $500m to racial equity causes, $46m to LGBTQ+ equity causes and $133m to gender equity causes.
"On this list, 91% of the racial equity organizations are run by leaders of color, 100% of the LGBTQ+ equity organizations are run by LGBTQ+ leaders, and 83% of the gender equity organizations are run by women, bringing lived experience to solutions for imbalanced social systems," she wrote.
that a surge in Amazon purchases during the coronavirus pandemic had boosted the net worth of CEO Jeff Bezos by $13billion in one day, making the world’s richest man even richer.
On Monday, , 56, enjoyed the biggest single-day increase in net worth of anyone in history on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
He is worth $189.3billion now, and more valuable than huge corporations including Nike, McDonald’s and Exxon Mobile, according to .
Due to her divorce settlement Mackenzie, who got 4 per cent of the company’s stock, is now worth $56.9bn, making her the second wealthiest woman in the world, behind L’Oreal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers.
hundreds of immigrant workers have slept outside Jeff Bezos' new $100m penthouse in New York after demanding that he pays more tax.
The stunt outside the world's richest man's Manhattan's penthouse was in support of a tax on billionaires to help raise money to help people hit hardest by the pandemic.
The protesters said the work of immigrants generates more than $1 billion in the U.S economy - but many of those were unable to receive benefits because of their citizenship status.
MOST READ IN US NEWS
The suggested tax on millionaires has been backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Gerry Vital, an immigrant from Mexico, who was working as a tour guide told ABC7: "I sold my car to pay for the last four months of the rent and I started selling tacos in the street."
Gerry and his wife said they were so desperate that they joined queues for food packages after not getting help from the government.