Since divorcing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Ms. Scott has come to embody a new brand of philanthropy. She has made large gifts to nonprofits that were distinguished not just by their dollar value but by the fact that she gave without dictating how the money should be spent.
Her disclosure came one week after Michael and Susan Dell traveled to the White House to join President Trump in celebrating the more than $6 billion they had committed to so-called Trump accounts. That donation is expected to put $250 in accounts for 25 million American children to use when they turn 18, though some progressives criticized it for burnishing the president’s reputation in the process.
When, in 2019, she committed to giving away at least half of her wealth as part of the Giving Pledge, Ms. Scott said, “I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.” As her net worth has waxed and waned in the ensuing years, some observers have questioned whether she would give her money away faster than her wealth could appreciate.
Having given more than $26 billion away, Ms. Scott is not only one of the biggest givers in absolute terms, but she has also given away a significant share of her total wealth, which Bloomberg estimates at nearly $40 billion. The Dells, for instance, are still worth more than $150 billion.
Ms. Scott is employing a subtly different public-relations strategy. She usually announces her gifts once or twice a year in blog posts and has criticized media coverage of her philanthropy that centers on the donations and not the recipients.
And so Tuesday, she included the $7 billion figure quietly, by updating the fourth paragraph of a blog post she had published in mid-October. She also updated the database maintained by her philanthropy, Yield Giving, with an additional 225 donations.
“This dollar total will likely be reported in the news,” she wrote in the post that was updated on Tuesday, “but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year.”
About 70 percent of those gifts went to organizations she had previously backed.
The largest disclosed donation was for $90 million, according to the database, going to an organization called Forests, People, Climate, which focuses on halting tropical deforestation. The next largest disclosed gifts were of $70 million each to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the United Negro College Fund, which offer scholarships.
As she often does, Ms. Scott used her post to talk about all the ways that people with fewer resources give. “Who nurtured a child in the kitchen; who was kind to a stranger in line at a grocery store; who gave $50 to a local food shelter: These are not news stories. But all of it matters,” Ms. Scott wrote.
by Nicholas Kulish and Theodore Schleifer, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Evan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press
[ed. History will look kindly upon her. It's not an easy process.]
[ed. History will look kindly upon her. It's not an easy process.]
