Mr. Tact wrote on Dec 16, 2020, 13:38:

Bumpy wrote on Dec 16, 2020, 13:08:
I had to look up who MacKenzie Scott was -> Bezos' ex-wife.

That's a lot of money given away. Major props to her. She done good, lots of good.

When you get $38b in a divorce settlement giving away $4.2b is nice -- but hardly a sacrifice. She deserves credit for the donation, but let's not saint her yet...

She signed a pledge to give most of her fortune away. That's a pretty good down payment. Look at all the other billionaires who can be pretty stingy, or spend it all on pie in the sky projects (granted, at least the pie in the sky money goes into the economy and stimulates business).

She is also taking a very careful approach. As people in the Civil service and who work in charitable organizations know well, just throwing money at something doesn't always help. There's a lot of charities that have become such bloated bureaucracies, that by the time they finish paying the bills (huge salaries for the executives, offices, supplies, employees, advertising, etc) they actually wind up spending a very small portion of their donations on the actual cause.

Also keep in mind that while she may be WORTH $38 billion, that doesn't mean that's LIQUID money. Most of that will be tied up in Amazon stock and other investments. You can't just dump all that stock overnight - you'd crash markets, and destroy world economies. Also early stock sales would de value later sales. There's also some regulations to prevent just cashing out that much stock. It's all has to be planned carefully. I think her original plan was to donate a couple of billion a year, but she wanted to do something more after this disaster of a year.

I'll give the lady some major credit for what she's doing.

This comment was edited on Dec 17, 2020, 11:44.