Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott got divorced in 2019.
Samir Hussein/Getty Images; Javier Rojas/Newscom
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos accepted an unusual award earlier this month. During an interfaith summit on religion and philanthropy at the Vatican, Bezos and chef Jose Andres became the first-ever recipients of the Galileo Prophets of Philanthropy Award from the Galileo Foundation, a Catholic charity focusing on issues like climate change and human trafficking.
“When my father came to the United States from Cuba, alone and speaking no English at the tender age of 16, the Catholic Church took him and 15 other boys under their care in a mission led by two priests in Wilmington, Delaware,” Bezos told a group of high-ranking Catholic officials in his acceptance speech. “Sitting here in the Vatican today, I would like to thank the Church for that gift.”
By Forbes’ count, Bezos has donated more than $2.4 billion to philanthropic causes in his lifetime. Forbes only counts money actually given away, not pledges of future support like Bezos’ landmark commitment to spend $10 billion to protect the environment. Of that pledge, made in 2020, $1.54 billion has been disbursed through the Bezos Earth Fund.
Compare that to powerhouse philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’s notoriously press-shy ex-wife, who has given away five times more than him—$12.8 billion—in a little over two years. That’s $10.2 billion more than Bezos. Don’t expect her to accept any awards, though. Scott doesn’t make public appearances or give interviews to the media. The only public-facing communication about her philanthropy comes in the form of semi-yearly updates on the blogging site Medium.
Neither Scott nor Bezos immediately responded to a request for comment from Forbes.
“The differences between their philanthropy couldn’t be more stark,” says Elizabeth Dale, an associate professor of nonprofit leadership at Seattle University. Besides sheer numbers, Scott has donated to a wide breadth of more than 1,200 organizations, from small nonprofits and social justice groups to household names like Planned Parenthood and the Girl Scouts. Bezos has given to some grassroots organizations focusing on homelessness through his Day One Fund, for example, but not to the same degree, Dale says.
“I think Mackenzie’s giving is reaching a group of organizations that largely have not been on the purview of the wealthiest donors in our country and in the world,” Dale adds.
The two philanthropists also appear to have very different mindsets about their giving. Scott has said her goal is to systematically get rid of her wealth. In her Giving Pledge letter, where she commits to giving away the majority of her fortune, she concedes, “I have a disproportionate amount of money to share. My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”
Bezos—who hasn’t signed the Giving Pledge—has made no such pronouncements about his fortune.
Jacqueline Ackerman, associate director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University, says that Scott’s giving also aligns with research finding that women tend to spread their giving across several causes, while men are more likely to concentrate their giving on specific issues.
“I would also say that I see Mackenzie Scott aligning with our research on how women give is the importance that she places on the cause and on the recipient, rather than on herself as a donor,” Ackerman says.
Overall, research has also shown that women are more likely to give more money to charity than men, though those gaps disappear among people with high net worths.
It’s true that Bezos has indeed increased his philanthropic efforts since stepping down as Amazon’s CEO in July last year. He’s made headline-grabbing donations to the Obama Foundation (a $100 million gift), the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum ($200 million over four years) and to nonprofits tackling homelessness. Still, his charitable donations are a relatively small percentage—1.7%—of his total net worth, which Forbes estimates is $141.7 billion as of Monday, Oct. 24, making him the third-richest person in the world. He has a Forbes Philanthropy Score of 2 out of 5, which means he’s given away between 1% and 4.99% of his fortune. Bezos is like the vast majority of the 400 richest people in America who have given less than 5% of their fortune to charitable causes.
Climate activists are skeptical of Bezos’s environmental philanthropy, too. The Amazon founder has so far poured an estimated $8.6 billion into his space company Blue Origin since 2000 and has faced fierce backlash, along with other space race billionaires, for looking to the stars rather than investing meaningfully in problems here on Earth.
“It just raises so many more questions for me about what strategy he has in both his giving and investing in an aerospace company versus redirecting that money to people who can benefit from it in the here and now,” Seattle University’s Dale says.
Bezos, for his part, counters that space exploration will benefit mankind on Earth. “Blue Origin’s long-term goal is to move all polluting industries off Earth,” Bezos said in his speech at the Vatican.
Bezos has also faced criticism for using his philanthropy to greenwash Amazon’s climate record. When Bezos first announced the creation of the Bezos Earth Fund, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an employee group inside the company, pointed out that Amazon provides cloud computing services to oil and gas companies. Amazon defends its position on its website by saying “the energy sector should have access to the same technologies as other industries” because it wants to “help them accelerate development of renewable energy businesses.”
“We applaud Jeff Bezos’ philanthropy, but one hand cannot give what the other is taking away,” the group wrote.
The company’s carbon footprint increased by 18% from 2020 to 2021, according to its 2021 sustainability report. Despite its pledge to become carbon neutral by 2040, activists like Greenpeace are generally critical of carbon offsets used by Amazon and other companies to achieve neutrality pledges in lieu of actually decreasing emissions.
Scott, on the other hand, is an outlier in terms of billionaire philanthropy. She’s one of only eight billionaires on The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans who has given away more than 20% of their net worth, much more than Bezos.
After receiving a quarter of Bezos’ Amazon shares as part of their divorce in 2019—shares then worth $36 billion—Scott has been giving away chunks of the fortune at an astonishing rate. She’s donated to more than 1,200 organizations since mid-2020, with her largest single donations going to Habitat for Humanity (a $436 million gift), the Boys and Girls Club of America (a $281 million donation) and Planned Parenthood (a $275 million gift).
Just this month, Scott has donated $15 million to affordable eyeglasses nonprofit VisionSpring, $15 million to the Paso del Norte Health Foundation in El Paso, Texas, $20 million to the Fresno Unified School District in California’s central valley, $84.5 million to the Girl Scouts and $5 million to the Greater Watertown Community Health Foundation in Wisconsin.
That’s not to say Scott hasn’t been subject to criticism. Last year, she wrote in a post on the blogging site Medium that she wasn’t going to announce which organizations received donations from her. The move was meant to shift the spotlight away from herself and let nonprofits speak for themselves, but Scott faced backlash for not being transparent about her giving. She reversed course a few days later and revealed that she is working on a website with a searchable database of her donations. Scott said she hoped the website would be available this year, but that hasn’t happened yet.
That’s actually something Scott and Bezos have in common. Neither use a family foundation for their philanthropy, which would require them to disclose in public tax filings which nonprofits they donate to and how much money they’ve donated to the foundation each year.