MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced in a blog post Tuesday that she has given away another $4 billion of her wealth to charitable causes.
Scott’s net worth ballooned to $60.7 billion this year on Amazon stock gains, according to a report by Bloomberg News. She is now the 18th-richest person in the world.
Scott already gave away $1.68 billion to nonprofit organizations, universities, community development groups, and legal organizations in July, according to a report by Fox 26 Houston. In her new blog post on Medium, Scott says that she asked her advisors to help her accelerate her charitable giving, in light of the coronavirus pandemic and its widespread economic fallout.
The billionaire and philanthropist asked her team to figure out how to give away her fortune faster https://t.co/W3So6JcuQY
— Bloomberg (@business) December 16, 2020
The result was reportedly $4,158,500,000 in donations distributed to 384 organizations over the last four months. Scott wrote that she gave “special attention to [organizations] operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital.” (RELATED: MacKenzie Bezos Plans To Give Half Of Her $37 Billion Fortune To Charity)
The organizations span a wide range, including food banks, colleges and universities, housing funds, and dozens of local chapters of United Way, Goodwill, Easterseals, and the YMCA, according to Scott’s blog post.
Melissa Berman, the chief executive officer of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, told Bloomberg that Scott’s nearly $6 billion in donations this year “has to be one of the biggest annual distributions by a living individual” to working charities.
Scott signed the Giving Pledge in 2019, promising to give away the majority of her wealth, according to Bloomberg. In an earlier blog post this year, Scott reiterated this promise and said she plans to “keep at it until the safe is empty.”