By the time he died in 1919, he had given away 90 percent of his fortune, helped build 3,000 libraries around the world, founded what became Carnegie Mellon University, paid for 7,000 church organs, built Carnegie Hall in New York City, and started the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Carnegie largely waited until he had sold his businesses and retired before committing most of his resources to philanthropy. “They desperately need causes that can absorb fortunes on a scale that we just haven’t seen before.”īezos stepped down as chief executive of Amazon on July 6, in part so he could devote more attention to philanthropy. “Something to watch pretty closely is how do you absorb this much money,” Soskis added. The incredible projected costs of developing industries in space could be one of the few causes that matches the size of the 21st-century mega-billionaires’ assets, Soskis said.
“This version of capitalism has broken the models of philanthropic redistribution that developed in the 20th century,” said Ben Soskis, senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy.Ĭarnegie gave away an estimated $350 million before his death in 1919, worth about $5.5 billion in today’s dollars, or less than 3 percent of Bezos’s fortune. That may be an indication that trying to give away vast fortunes to worthy causes - in the footsteps of business magnates of the past like Carnegie and Rockefeller - has become outmoded. Still, even Scott has been unable to outpace the rise in Amazon’s stock price with her giving: Bloomberg puts her current net worth at $63 billion, good for 15th in the world. After donating $6 billion to hundreds of charities in 2020, she gave away another $2.7 billion in June. She immediately signed the “Giving Pledge,” promising to give away the majority of her wealth. MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’s former wife, got $36 billion in Amazon stock as part of the couple’s 2019 split and has been much more aggressive in giving the money away. We have to do both.”īlue Origin did not respond to an e-mail from the Globe seeking comment.
We’ve always done that as a species, as a civilization. And we always need to look to the future. “We have lots of problems here and now on Earth and we need to work on those. On Monday in an interview with CNN, Bezos acknowledged critics of the flight. And last week, he gave $200 million to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. Amid criticism of Amazon’s impact on climate change, Bezos last year pledged $10 billion to address the crisis, doling out about $800 million in actual donations to environmental groups. In 2018, after years of muted donations, Bezos and his then-wife gave $2 billion to fight homelessness and improve education. Rockefeller, or the more recent mega-billionaire Bill Gates, in building his fortune before focusing on philanthropy.īut the scale of Bezos’s wealth may also require giving on a scale never seen before, even from Gates. Until two weeks ago, he was busy running Amazon, so he could be following the path of 19th-century magnates Andrew Carnegie and John D. In terms of philanthropy, Bezos’s activity has not kept pace with his riches. But with Amazon’s stock price nearly quintupling in the past five years, the spending has barely dented his net worth. Bezos has said he is selling $1 billion a year of his Amazon stock holdings to fund Blue Origin.
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