#Jeff Bezos’ ex MacKenzie says she’s donated $1.7B to charities in 2020

Amazon titan Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife revealed Tuesday that she has given away nearly $1.7 billion to nonprofits battling everything from racial and gender inequities to global warming.

“Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror,” MacKenzie Bezos wrote in an open letter posted on the Web site Medium.

“Life will never stop finding fresh ways to expose inequities in our systems; or waking us up to the fact that a civilization this imbalanced is not only unjust, but also unstable.”

MacKenzie — whose divorce from Jeff made her one of the richest women in the world, with an estimated fortune of at least $36 billion — pledged last year to donate half her money to charity.

In her statement Tuesday, the philanthropist listed more than 115 charities she has given money to so far, including everyone from the Movement for Black Lives, the Harlem Children’s Zone-COVID-19 Relief and Recovery and Hispanic Scholarship Fund to the National Women’s Law Center, Obama Foundation and George W. Bush Presidential Center.

“I began work to complete my pledge with the belief that my life had yielded two assets that could be of particular value to others: the money these systems helped deliver to me, and a conviction that people who have experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions,” wrote MacKenzie, 50.

“Last fall, I asked a team of non-profit advisors with key representation from historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups to help me find and assess organizations having major impact on a variety of causes.

“I’m posting an update today because my own reflection after recent events revealed a dividend of privilege I’d been overlooking: the attention I can call to organizations and leaders driving change.”

She said she chose non-profits based on their “transformative work” in nine areas, including racial and gender equity, public health, global development and climate change.

MacKenzie and Jeff divorced in July 2019.