Skip to main content

Jeff Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie has donated $1.7 billion of her wealth since their divorce, and taken a new last name

* Last year Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie divorced, leaving her with a fortune of about $36 billion and thirteenth-richest person in the world. * In a blog post on Tuesday MacKenzie announced she has donated $1.7 billion to 116 organizations over the past year. * She has also changed her name to MacKenzie Scott. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon's billionaire chief executive Jeff Bezos, has donated $1.7 billion of her wealth in the past year to causes including racial equality, LGBTQ rights, public health and climate change, she said in a blog post on Tuesday. Scott, who was previously known as MacKenzie Bezos, also announced her new last name, which she said was taken from her middle name. Last year, Scott signed the Giving Pledge in a commitment to donate the majority of her fortune after her split from Bezos — the world's richest man — left her with a 4% stake in Amazon. "Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror," she wrote in a post on Medium. "I began work to complete my pledge with the belief that my life had yielded two assets that could be of particular value to others: the money these systems helped deliver to me, and a conviction that people who have experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions," she added. In her blog post Scott listed a total of 116 organizations which she has donated to. She also broke down how much she has donated to various causes by category, the top three causes Scott donated to were: racial equity ($587 million), economic mobility ($400 millon), and gender equity ($133 million). At the time of the divorce, Scott's Amazon stake was worth about $36 billion. Her fortune has grown to over $60 billion with a jump in Amazon's shares this year. Jeff Bezos' fortune has also skyrocketed, growing by more than $60 billion since the beginning of this year putting his net worth at roughly $178 billion, per Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Scott made her announcement a day before Jeff Bezos will appear for his first-ever Congressional testimony in front of an antitrust panel, which has been investigating how Amazon has allegedly used its market power to hurt smaller rivals. Join the conversation about this story »
https://bit.ly/3jN53lw

Popular posts from this blog

Tokyo installed see-through public toilets in a park to let people inspect their cleanliness before using them, at which point the glass turns opaque

* Two see-through bathrooms have been installed in public parks in Tokyo. * They are made from "smart glass" designed so people can see how clean they are inside before using them. The glass turns opaque when the bathroom is locked and in use. * The stalls are part of a project that is redoing 17 of the city's public bathrooms with different designers to make them more accessible and appealing. * The goal is to fight assumptions that public toilets are "are dark, dirty, smelly, and scary," said the nonprofit foundation behind the project. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Tokyo has installed two see-through bathroom facilities in public parks, allowing people to see how clean they are before deciding to use them, at which point they turn opaque. The bathrooms are made of colored "smart glass," which turns opaque when the stalls are locked, said Shigeru Ban, the architect behind the designs. You can see how it works her...
Read more

Bill Gates says the world would need as many as 14 billion doses of a coronavirus vaccine to stop the virus

* The world could need as many as 14 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines, Bill Gates said on Thursday in a blog post about the race to develop a way to make people immune to the disease. * "We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this to happen as quickly as possible," Gates said. * Gates said he had his eyes on eight to 10 promising candidates, adding that healthcare workers and people in low-income countries should be first in line once we find one that works. * While potential vaccines are progressing with historic speed, they're still months, or even years away, and the biggest challenge lies ahead in proving whether they are safe and effective in humans. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Bill Gates believes we may eventually need to produce as many as 14 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines globally and that we're anywhere from nine months to two years away from making tha...
Read more

The 11 most important details we already know about the PlayStation 5, Sony's next-generation video game console set to arrive this year

* The PlayStation 5, Sony's next-generation game console that's deep in production, is scheduled to launch during the 2020 holiday season. * As you might expect, the PlayStation 5 is promised to be more powerful than the existing PlayStation 4 — and we've slowly been learning more about the next-gen console's new features since it was first revealed. * So far, Sony has offered a first glimpse at the new console via its new DualSense gamepad, and a tech demo highlighted the technical prowess of the new machine. * Here's everything we know so far about Sony's next-generation PlayStation console. * Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. The PlayStation 5 is almost here. Sony's next-generation PlayStation game console is scheduled to arrive this holiday season, but we already know plenty of details about it right now: how powerful it is, its main features, and we've even gotten a good look at its new gamepad.  Here everything we kno...
Read more