It’s been a news-packed week for billionaire watchers. Between the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried, MacKenzie Scott’s latest grant drop and Elon Musk’s shenanigans at his $44 billion albatross, it would be easy to miss what may end up being the biggest news of all, in sheer dollar terms.
On CNN earlier this week, Jeff Bezos and his partner Lauren Sanchez sat down for an interview and talked philanthropy. The network called it the first time the couple has appeared for an interview together since 2019, when their relationship went public and the Amazon founder divorced the woman who’d go on to win our Philanthropist of the Year award twice in a row.
The interview was wide-ranging, but the main takeaway is this: Bezos says he plans to give away most of his fortune during his lifetime. At the moment, he said, “We’re building the capacity to be able to give away this money.”
Bezos and Sanchez were light on the details about what, exactly, that means. They also didn’t unveil any new giving vehicles or specific commitments. But it’s telling that Bezos, who has not signed the Giving Pledge, finally chose to make this statement in an interview coinciding with his latest “Courage and Civility Award” to a beloved music icon, less than a week after a fractious election, and amid news of thousands of layoffs at Amazon.
“Civility” seems to be a watchword for Bezos these days. And while it’s perhaps impossible for someone with $120 billion, lately he’s projecting an image that is relatively conventional. Since he stepped down from his CEO role at Amazon at the start of 2021, Bezos has been a fairly drama-free foil to the mercurial electric car baron who has since supplanted him as the world’s richest man. While other billionaires crash, burn and destroy things, the 58-year-old Bezos seems to be following a well-worn path: that of the ultra-rich founder who turns to philanthropy in his later years.
It’s an open question whether Bezos’ expanding philanthropic pursuits stem from a need to manage his reputation, genuine concern about the state of the world, the influence of Sanchez or other advisors, a desire to keep up with his ex-wife, or maybe all of those reasons at once. What is certain is that the current shape of Bezos giving is not its final form. What can we expect from Jeff Bezos as he attempts to enter his Bill Gates era? If I had to guess, I’d say the man who revolutionized the way we shop won’t do the same for philanthropy.
The story so far
Next to early birds like Mark Zuckerberg or the ill-fated Bankman-Fried, Bezos came much later to big philanthropy. As he built Amazon into a behemoth, much of his early giving came in relatively small chunks and on an ad-hoc basis, at times involving the Bezos Family Foundation, which his parents Mike and Jackie Bezos lead.
That remained the case until around four years ago, when Bezos finally got around to large-scale giving via the Bezos Day One Fund. Founded with a $2 billion commitment back when Jeff and MacKenzie were still married, the Day One Fund pursues two lines of work: relief for unhoused people through the Day 1 Families Fund, and early childhood education through the Day 1 Academies Fund. The former has directed about $100 million a year to homeless shelters and other service providers across the country, while the latter has been pumping money into the Bezos Academy, a network of “Montessori-inspired” preschools.
Some other notable gifts have come down the pike, including a $33 million commitment in 2018 to establish a scholarship fund for DACA students and $200 million to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum last year. But Bezos’ biggest philanthropic project, by far, has been his Earth Fund.
We’ve been following the Bezos Earth Fund closely since it got up and running in early 2020. Established with a $10 billion pledge and set to operate for 10 years, the Earth Fund has since been a mammoth player in environmental giving, disbursing large sums to grantees working on everything from climate change mitigation to land conservation, marine and freshwater initiatives and wildlife preservation. Notably, while the Earth Fund began by funding mostly “big green” groups, climate justice grantees have since taken on greater prominence in its portfolio. The Earth Fund also hasn’t been shy about joining forces with other big-name green funders on collaborative efforts like the Protecting Our Planet Challenge and the Global Energy Alliance for Peace and Planet.
The latest major development in the world of Bezos giving may not be the largest in dollar terms, but it’s probably the most unconventional. In mid-2021, and fresh from a space jaunt, Bezos announced his inaugural “Courage and Civility Awards,” in which hand-picked individuals get $100 million to give to the charities of their choice.
The first two recipients were José Andrés, the celebrated chef and founder of World Central Kitchen, and Van Jones, longtime television commentator and former special advisor to President Barack Obama. This week, only one award was bestowed, to country music legend and longtime philanthropist Dolly Parton.
“Civility” and convention
In his comments to CNN alongside Sanchez, Bezos characterized the Day One Fund as a way to respond to immediate needs and the Bezos Earth Fund as a longer-term commitment. “I feel like you have to do things at two time scales,” he said. “You have to work on the urgent, the here-and-now, the immediate, and you have to work on the long term.”
But listen to Bezos on why Parton got this year’s award. “She’s a unifier. You know, we have big problems in the world, and the way you get big problems done is you have to work together,” Bezos said. “We have too many examples in the world of conflict and people using ad hominem attacks on social media… you won’t find Dolly Parton doing that.”
Sure, that might sound like a feel-good bromide, and it is that, but it also gives us some much-needed insight into how Bezos wants to situate his career as a mega-philanthropist, which might extend through the next quarter-century or more.
He won’t, for instance, be an Elon Musk, courting online controversy and pooh-poohing conventional philanthropy. (It’s telling that one of his rare Twitter spats involved a ham-handed gesture toward civility, in which he descended out of the blue to chide an academic about her strongly worded tweet following Queen Elizabeth’s death.)
If anything, Bezos’ philanthropic trajectory seems like it might develop in a quasi-Gatesian mode. Like Gates before him, Bezos seems to be pursuing a gradual metamorphosis from cutthroat CEO to beneficent mega-giver. This statement about giving most of his fortune away is pretty much a Giving Pledge in everything but name, and it’s equally nonbinding. And then there’s Lauren Sanchez to consider. The former news anchor isn’t married to Bezos, but their comments do imply her close involvement in Bezos’ philanthropic capacity-building. Their apparent couple-centric approach to giving is another conventional move, and it echoes Bill and Melinda.
Bezos and Sanchez’s most oddball move has been the awards, which read like an off-the-cuff and somewhat overwhelming way for a centibillionaire to favor people he happens to like. In that sense, they contrast with the well-oiled Gatesian grantmaking infrastructure Bezos implies he wants to set up.
It appears that José Andrés has had an easier time moving his $100 million out the door, what with his international charity already in place. Van Jones, though, seems to have been taken unaware and may lack the capacity to give away the money on short notice, though criminal justice reform is one probable destination on his end. Parton, like Andrés, has plenty of philanthropic infrastructure already set up, so it may be that Bezos and Sanchez learned something there.
Going forward, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Bezos and Sanchez build on the celebrity-oriented Courage and Civility Awards with more funding to push against division and polarization. That might involve bridge-building work, a philanthropic niche that Bezos largesse could grow by orders of magnitude. Given Bezos’ ownership of the Washington Post (which he listed as one of his “passions” when he stepped down as Amazon’s CEO), along with Sanchez’s professional background, we might even see some journalism or media funding down the line.
The MacKenzie Scott in the room
While it’s perhaps a little dishy, it’s difficult not to compare Bezos’ philanthropy to that of his former wife, MacKenzie Scott, who, over the past two years, has shoveled out some $14 billion in one of the most radical and disruptive philanthropic projects in history.
For one, we probably won’t see much ideologically pointed movement-giving in the vein of Scott. Then again, the Bezos Earth Fund has been encouragingly progressive in some ways, so you never know. We also likely won’t see Bezos emulate the kind of massive, fast-paced, general support funding that Scott has become known for — a rare case of a billionaire who actually seems to want to get it all out the door.
In the CNN interview, Bezos trotted out the usual language about how hard it is to give away lots of money, saying “There are a bunch of ways that I think you could do ineffective things.” This sounds a lot more like the tone we hear from dozens of Giving Pledge signatories, who talk a big game about not wanting to hoard their money, but often end up richer than they were before they made the pledge. Regardless, we can now say with some certainty that Bezos and his fortune, perhaps like Gates or Warren Buffett, are going to be an outsized presence in the sector for many years to come.