💸PHILANTHROPY — SOME BILLIONAIRES DONATE BILLIONS TO PROMOTE SOCIAL JUSTICE, WHILE OTHERS BLAST THEMSELVES INTO SPACE!🚀

MacKenzie Scott
MacKenzie Scott
Philanthropist & Author
Official USG Photo from 2016 Naturalization Ceremony
Public Realm

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bess Levin
Bess Levin
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair

Bess Levin in the Levin Report:

On Tuesday, for the third time in less than a year, Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, announced that she had given more than a billion dollars to charity. This time, it was $2.74 billion to 286 different organizations, including ones focused racial justice. That brings her charitable giving since divorcing Bezos in 2019 to more than $8 billion, with much of it coming in the last 12 months, including $4.2 billion in grants announced last December. In a Medium post published this morning, Scott wrote that she and her new husband, Dan Jewett, as well as “a constellation of researchers and administrators and advisors,” are “attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” and that they are “governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands.” She didn’t add, “like those of my cheapskate ex-husband, Jeff,” though it’s hard to believe she wasn’t thinking it!

Even if Scott was not, few people will be able to look at the huge amounts of money she has been giving away and not think about the fact that Bezos, the literal richest man in the world, has distributed what philanthropic experts define as “diddly-squat” as a proportion of his wealth, preferring instead to focus on launching himself into space. In 2018, amidst substantiated reports that Amazon employees relieve themselves in bottles or forego bathroom breaks for fear “of being disciplined for idling and losing their jobs as a result,” and data revealing that nearly one third of Amazon’s Arizona employees were relying on food stamps, Bezos said in an interview that he couldn’t for the life of him think of a way to spend his vast fortune outside of funding his for-profit rocket-ship company, Blue Origin. (“The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel,” he told Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner. “That is basically it.… I am currently liquidating about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I plan to continue to do that for a long time. Because you’re right, you’re not going to spend it on a second dinner out.”) A month after that, Amazon was instrumental in killing a proposed $275-per-employee tax for large Seattle–based businesses that would have helped alleviate the city’s serious homeless problem caused by companies like Amazon.

Over the years, Bezos has said things about charitable giving like, “Our core business activities are probably the most important thing we do to contribute, as well as our employment in the area,” and, “I’m convinced that in many cases, for-profit models improve the world more than philanthropy models, if they can be made to work.” In 2010 he donated $100,000 to help vanquish an initiative to impose a state income tax on Washington’s wealthiest residents, per The Seattle Times. “There’s almost nothing I could have predicted with more precision than that Jeff would hate the idea,” early Amazon investor Nick Hanauer, a backer of the initiative, told the outlet.

Speaking of taxes, Amazon, of course, pays very little of them, having avoided federal income taxes in numerous years. Meanwhile, Bezos himself was recently featured in ProPublica for paying nothing in federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011, and paying a “true tax rate” of 0.98% between 2014 and 2018. He also applied for and received a $4,000 tax credit for his children in 2011, when he was worth roughly $18 billion, ProPublica reported.

Only being human, Bezos apparently doesn’t like it when people start wondering why he doesn’t give away more of his $195.2 billion fortune. After The New York Times insinuated a few years ago that he was a cheap prick, Bezos announced that he would donate $2 billion to philanthropic ventures, which at the time represented a tiny fraction of his net worth (now, it’s much less). Last year, he pledge significantly more through the Bezos Earth Fund, though as Recode noted in February:

…the fact is that we don’t even know where that $10 billion sits. Is the money actually placed in a charitable vehicle like a foundation, a donor-advised fund, or a limited liability company? Or is it more of a rhetorical pledge, similar to Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s commitment in 2015 to set aside 99 percent of their money to philanthropy.… We don’t know. Bezos’s representatives have consistently declined to share information on the Earth Fund’s structure.

Next month, Bezos will (temporarily) leave earth, after adding $65 billion to his net worth during the pandemic.

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Read the rest of the always entertaining  Levin Report at this link:

https://mailchi.mp/a7ec07e7054e/levin-report-trumps-heart-bursting-with-sympathy-for-his-buddy-bob-kraft-5103878?e=adce5e3390

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

06-16-21

😇SPIRIT OF THE SEASON: One Of World’s Most Remarkable Persons, MacKenzie Scott Donates $6 Billion, Cuts Red Tape, Targets Inequality & Under-appreciated Communities! — “Donations were focused on those ‘operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital.’”👍🏼

MacKenzie Scott
MacKenzie Scott
Philanthropist & Author
Official USG Photo from 2016 Naturalization Ceremony
Public Realm

https://apple.news/AX_umtRaoRZS_MdbBNdEJXw

From Bloomberg News:

MacKenzie Scott Gives Away $4.2 Billion in Four Months

By Sophie Alexander and Ben Steverman, December 15, 2020, 12:44 PM EST, updated at December 15, 2020, 3:21 PM EST

MacKenzie Scott is giving away her fortune at an unprecedented pace, donating more than $4 billion in four months after announcing $1.7 billion in gifts in July.

The world’s 18th-richest person outlined the latest contributions in a blog post Tuesday, saying she asked her team to figure out how to give away her fortune faster. Scott’s wealth has climbed $23.6 billion this year to $60.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as Amazon.com Inc., the primary source of her fortune, has surged.

“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” she wrote in the post on Medium. “Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires.”

Scott’s gifts this year approach $6 billion, which “has to be one of the biggest annual distributions by a living individual” to working charities, according to Melissa Berman, chief executive officer of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Berman said Scott’s donations show that it’s possible to give large amounts quickly without requiring nonprofits to “jump through a lot of hoops to get the money.” The size of Scott’s gifts also disprove a common theory that’s it’s hard to deploy vast amounts of money without running into trouble or proving wasteful.

Sharing Results

Scott’s advisers zeroed-in on 384 groups to receive gifts, she said in the post, after considering almost 6,500 organizations. Donations were focused on those “operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital.”

Recipients include more than 30 institutions of higher education, including several tribal colleges and historically Black colleges and universities. More than 40 food banks received money, as did almost four dozen local affiliates of Goodwill Industries International.

Scott King, the executive director for Meals on Wheels of Tampa, said he didn’t even apply for the grant they received. Instead, her team contacted the nonprofit, which delivers food to about 850 homes and makes about 2,600 meals each day.

“This comes at a great time for us,” he said. “There are areas in and around Tampa that aren’t being served and need to be.”

Betsy Biemann, CEO of Maine-based Coastal Enterprises Inc., said it received $10 million, equivalent to the size of their annual operating budget. It’s a show of how powerful Scott’s enormous fortune is, especially when she decides to give to smaller organizations.

“It’s an amazing day at the end of what’s been a very challenging year,” said Biemann, whose nonprofit provides financing and advice to small businesses and entrepreneurs, especially those from rural areas or disadvantaged groups.

Scott listed the names of the groups that received the money, just as she did for the 116 organizations in her July letter. In her announcement this summer, Scott said she decided to make the gifts public in part to call attention to “organizations and leaders driving change.”

Philanthropy experts applauded Scott’s work not only for how quickly she’s given away her fortune, but also how she’s gone about it.

. . . .

Updates with recipient comment in eighth paragraph.)

To contact the reporters on this story:
Sophie Alexander in San Francisco at salexander82@bloomberg.net;
Ben Steverman in New York at bsteverman@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net
Steven Crabill, Sophie Alexander

More Like This:

The Global Food System Is Also A Victim Of Covid

Dec. 2, 2020

Covid Supercharged the World’s Takeout Habit and Left a Big Mess

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Read the rest of this inspiring report at the link. Talk about real leadership and “making a difference at a time of greatest need!”

PWS

12-16-20