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Billionaire MacKenzie Scott is giving away money almost as fast as she’s making it.
In a Medium blog post Tuesday, Scott, a novelist and philanthropist, said she has donated more than $4.1 billion over the past four months alone.
That’s on top of $1.7 billion she had given away as of July.
Scott was formerly married to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, +0.26%, and her massive philanthropic gifts have come as her fortune has grown, thanks to Amazon’s rising stock price. Her personal wealth has grown by $23.8 billion this year, to $60.7 billion, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, which lists her as the world’s 18th-richest person.
“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” Scott wrote Tuesday. “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 said that earlier this year she asked her advisers to help her accelerate her giving, “through immediate support to people suffering the economic effects of the crisis.”
She said 384 organizations in the U.S. have benefited, including food banks, emergency relief funds and support services for the most vulnerable.
Those 384 organizations had been vetted and narrowed from a list of nearly 6,500 groups, she said, and the funds come with no strings attached.
“These 384 carefully selected teams have dedicated their lives to helping others, working and volunteering and serving real people face-to-face at bedsides and tables, in prisons and courtrooms and classrooms, on streets and hospital wards and hotlines and frontlines of all types and sizes, day after day after day,” Scott wrote.
“If you’re craving a way to use your time, voice, or money to help others at the end of this difficult year, I highly recommend a gift to one of the thousands of organizations doing remarkable work all across the country,” she wrote. “The hope you feed with your gift is likely to feed your own.”
In 2019, Scott joined the Giving Pledge, the campaign organized by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, in which the world’s wealthiest people vow to donate more than half their fortune to charities or philanthropic causes over their lifetime.
Her ex-husband is the world’s richest individual, with a fortune around $185 billion. He has not signed the Giving Pledge. Last month, Bezos gave $791 million to environmental groups as the start of a $10 billion pledge to fight the effects of climate change.
