Amazon Co-founder Mackenzie quietly gave over $4B to 384 organizations in 2020
mackenzie-scott.medium.com
mackenzie-scott.medium.com
"In 1993, Scott and Bezos were married, and in 1994, they both left D. E. Shaw, moved to Seattle, and started Amazon. Scott was one of Amazon's first employees, and was heavily involved in Amazon's early days, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts and shipping early orders.[4][8] She also negotiated the company's first freight contract.[8] When Amazon began to succeed, Scott took a less involved role in the business, preferring to focus on her family and literary career.[4]"
Employee != co-founder.
I don’t think anyone thinks of Mackenzie as an Amazon co-founder (nor have I read anywhere other than this editorialized title).
That’s not to play down her involvement and contribution to Amazon in its early days, but it’s disingenuous to call her a co-founder.
looks like the submitter called here that, possibly to create a flamewar like this.
She worked at Amazon and she is one of the people that made the company succeed.
Those early employees however are not called co-founders.
I suspect Amazon was a similar afair. They both quit their job and moved city to start and work on Amazon. When the company began, she was working on it with Bezos, both together.
It's possible that they then decided similarly not to bother with adding her name to the company officially, since as they were married that doesn't really matter. In fact, IANAL, but I'd suspect it might be complicated to do so, since by your marriage you already have a contract with one another, and as a contractual business partner you'd have another contract, and I wouldn't be surprised if that gets messy as both contract can easily conflict and the marriage contract has special status.
So I think it's fair to consider her a co-founder, in that she acted as one, took all the same risks, quit her job, moved city, worked on starting the company, put her financials at risk and invested her own money into it, etc. Even though she's not really a co-founder as registered in the company itself.
Is a link to the blog of said co-founder, where she discusses her philanthropy.
Her Wikipedia page describes her as "an American novelist and philanthropist" and the largest section of that page is entitled "Philanthropy".
I don't mean to criticize Mackenzie for this, just the unnecessary (and inaccurate) editorializing of the HN post title.
There is a difference in this strange other land between publishing the donations with some explanations so those interested can find out, and the usual way, which involves PR pieces, interviews abs dinner plates at a grand a pop.
I mean I had no idea she had done this, yet I watched a big robo-ball follow Jeff around a garden.
So yeah, I would think that, in this weird land, that was actually, quiet :-)
Edit: and now I’m getting downvoted. C’mon HN, be more diverse than this.
Better to just give a compensatory upvote and move on. Commenting on downvotes helps no one and is against the guide lines.
She goes by MacKenzie Scott.
However: What should "384 ways to help?" tell me? It's clickbait.
The edited title at least gives me an idea what the content is all about. It's so good it actually serves as a summary.
It's incredibly refreshing.
Charitable donations are great, more people should donate to private charities that benefit their communities as I strongly believe many of these organizations genuinely do more good than government programs! However, her blog screams "look how much money I gave away" / "I'm one of the good rich people - please don't kill me when you decide to pillage the rich".
I love that she's giving the money to small organisations apparently with no strings attached and where cash is needed. Seems great in contrast to the paternalistic micromanagement on issues with questionable efficacy that so many other philanthropists engage in.
Her giving seems focused on direct relief. If you had to divide philanthropy into just two camps, you could consider one camp is direct relief of societal symptoms and the other is advocacy to fix the underlying societal problems. For example, giving a man a fish to eat versus teaching fishing lessons.
It's easy to think that direct relief is ineffective compared to systemic change. When you get into the details, though, implementing societal change is a lot more complicated. You have the Koch brothers and George Soros both trying to improve societies through public advocacy, in opposite directions, with lots of failed projects along the way. While direct relief may not create long-term solutions, the real world benefits are more directly measurable.
In a plague year (followed by new crises in the new year), regardless of critiques of her approach, I hope we can all appreciate her compassionate giving.
Almost none of the signees have as of yet made significant progress towards upholding their pledge to give away half of their wealth, instead only accumulating more of it. Since the pledge was created in 2010, the wealth of the donors has not decreased but has instead increased from a combined $376 billion in 2010 to a combined $734 billion in 2020 [2]. Many who have made significant donations, have done so to private foundations, which often pay salaries to their family members and have no obligation by law to actually spend the wealth on active charity organisations.[citation needed]
Donations in general are a topic of public debate, in part, because in many countries they are tax-deductible, which means donations reduce tax obligations for individuals, and tax revenue for government.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacKenzie_Scott
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge
[2] https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#5f078cfc3d78
I don't think they thought they were agreeing to give away half of every future dollar.
They are giving billions away, and trying to look for ways to condemn what they're doing is only punishing a good thing. Never punish a behaviour you want more of.
PS the tax deduction thing is envious garbage - you can only deduct the amount of tax on the dollars you donate (ie your top marginal tax rate). So you have to lose a LOT more than you "gain" through deduction. You don't come out ahead.
And you should never have been taxed because you didn't keep the dollar.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-14/mit-sloan...
Really? Let’s say your top marginal tax rate is 40%. That means when you donate a dollar, you get 40 cents back in taxes. When given the choice between 40 cents going to the government or one dollar going to a billionaire-chosen charity, I’d pick the charity every time.
If you agree with that, then it doesn’t make sense to criticize donations on the basis that they reduce tax revenue. (it may still make sense to change the law regarding deductions, however)
If you disagree with that, I would be interested to hear your reasoning. It seems to me that people like Bill Gates have actually donated a pretty large chunk of their wealth to truly good causes. Would you have preferred 40% of this money go to the government instead and Gates to have kept the rest? Or is the average billionaire donation much less effective than Gates’?
Give one billion to every charity on givewell's list, and now those have more money than can effectively spend in the foreseeable future. Yet you wil have spent nowhere close to your entire fortune.
While I don't understand why billionaires haven't done so yet, I can understand why it may make sense to be patient and search for great charitable opportunities.
An enormous amount of philanthropic money ostensibly meant to support the marginalized ends up spent on paperwork and "middle management" to do applications, book-keeping for allocation and reporting requirements, and reporting -- and the salaries for the people doing all that, who are not usually the 'marginalized' intended to support.
Eliminating all that with unrestricted gifts with no reporting requiremens is huge -- and very unlike most of the "data-driven" "entrepeneurial giving" that is all the rage.
http://m.nautil.us/blog/-larry-david-and-the-game-theory-of-...
I believe her donations are an admirable action, but I have heard about this from every source of news I visit.
I have no doubt that this was a sincere move, from her heart.
Source?
Here, MacKenzie Scott has made a choice to give money back to causes which support underprivileged people (which will doubtless include some of those same Amazon employees), which she did not have to.
But definitely worse than Amazon paying a better wage and not treating employees like robots.