The giving spree

IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT BEING OBSCENELY, OUTrageously rich. I know you’ve done it before. You probably have a list of priorities: college for the kids, new car, paid-off debts. Forget that list. That list is puny. You’re so rich that you can do everything on it three times. You could buy a small Massachusetts town and deliver the title deed to Harvard along with your kid’s application. You could get Jay Leno to autograph the mud flap of his 1994 McLaren F1 before selling it to you. You could eliminate the debt of Kentucky. This is the kind of rich where nothing except a second home on an exoplanet is out of your reach.

That is the position in which MacKenzie Scott found herself in July 2019, when her divorce from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was finalized and she became the owner of 4% of Amazon’s stock. She was a single woman in her 50th year with about $38 billion to blow. Since then, Amazon’s share price has grown like the piles of cardboard boxes it leaves on doorsteps of quarantined homes, so estimates of her wealth are even higher, something like $57 billion. And that’s after she gave away $5.9 billion.

People have given away that much before. But not usually so fast. Or without starting a foundation first. Or without any of the recipients asking for it or even knowing in advance. Or with so few strings attached; the organizations can use the money in any way they see fit. One of the beneficiaries of her largesse, Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), got an amount, $30 million, that was 3,000% of the size of any other gift in its history. A community college in Nebraska got $15 million, equal to its entire endowment. The Charlotte, N.C., YMCA got $18 million, enough to make its CEO burst into tears. According to Candid, an organization that tracks