MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced more than $4 billion in charitable donations since summertime.
Scott, who goes by her maiden name instead of Bezos, announced in a Medium post on Tuesday that she had given nearly $4.2 billion to 384 organizations across the United States in the past four months.
Many of the groups are focused on people’s basic needs, such as food security amid the coronavirus pandemic, which she decried as a “wrecking ball,” while other donations were made to organizations working to address long-term “inequities.”
“Some are filling basic needs: food banks, emergency relief funds, and support services for those most vulnerable,” she wrote. “Others are addressing long-term systemic inequities that have been deepened by the crisis: debt relief, employment training, credit and financial services for under-resourced communities, education for historically marginalized and underserved people, civil rights advocacy groups, and legal defense funds that take on institutional discrimination.”
The amount of money provided to each organization was not announced, but she did note, “We looked at 6,490 organizations, and undertook deeper research into 822. We put 438 of these on hold for now due to insufficient evidence of impact, unproven management teams, or to allow for further inquiry about specific issues such as treatment of community members or employees.”
Scott is listed by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as being worth more than $60 billion.
In July, she announced in a similar fashion that she had donated around $1.7 billion of her fortune to charitable groups. At the time, she donated $586.7 million to groups supporting racial equity; $399.5 million toward economic mobility; $133 million to gender equity; $128.3 million to public health; $46 million to LGBT equity; $55 million to “empathy and bridging divides”; $72 million to “functional democracy”; $130 million to global development; and $125 million to combat climate change.
