Why hasn’t Jeff Bezos donated as much to charity as billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg?

Mar 20 , 2020

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has given millions to charity and promised a new billion-dollar investment in India. Photo: AFP/Amazon

The Amazon CEO is the world’s richest man, but despite giving millions to support gay marriage, immigrant rights and fighting homelessness, his philanthropy falls far short of most modern tech moguls

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may be the world’s richest person, but he isn’t well-known for his billion-dollar donations and philanthropic efforts the way Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are.

Additional criticism has recently been heaped on Bezos’ charitable ways – or at lack of – particularly after Amazon committed just US$690,000 to relief efforts for the Australian bush fires last year. In 2019, Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, opted in 2019 to sign the Giving Pledge, in which participants promise to give away more than half of their wealth during their lifetimes or in their wills.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of more than US$117 billion, is the only one who has not signed on to the philanthropic Giving Pledge commitment. Photo: AFP

However, among the five richest people in America, Jeff Bezos – who has a net worth of more than US$117 billion – is the only one who has not signed on to the philanthropic commitment.

It’s not clear why Bezos has avoided joining the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett almost a decade ago. His charitable history has “remained largely a mystery”, The New York Times wrote in 2017 after Bezos posted a “request for ideas” for philanthropy on Twitter.

A non-profit bearing Bezos’ last name, the Bezos Family Foundation, has given millions of dollars to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. However, the fund is run entirely by the Amazon CEO’s parents and has not received contributions from Bezos himself, according to Inside Philanthropy.

Additionally, Bezos had never appeared on the annual list of America’s 50 largest donors until 2018, when he took the top spot with the launch of a US$2 billion fund for education programmes for the homeless. That donation represented about 1.3 per cent of his net worth at the time, Quartz reported.

Here are all the major donations Bezos is known to have given to charity since becoming a billionaire in 1997:

August 2011: US$10 million to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle