MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, has donated more than $4bn (£3bn) to food banks and emergency relief funds in just four months.
MacKenzie divorced Bezos early this year after he cheated on her and got billions of dollars in divorce compensation from the world’s richest man.
Ms Scott is now the world’s 18th-richest person, as her wealth skyrocketed from $23.6bn this year to $60.7bn.
In a blog post, Ms Scott said she wanted to help Americans who were struggling because of the pandemic.
“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” she wrote in a blog post on Tuesday night, December 15, adding that she had picked more than 380 charities to donate to having considered almost 6,500 organisations.
“Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of colour and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires.”
She also donated $1.7bn to 116 charities in July saying she wanted to call attention to “organisations and leaders driving change.”
Her total donations in 2020 alone is almost $6bn.
According to her, the donations were focused on those “operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital.”
“We leveraged this collective knowledge base in a collaboration that included hundreds of emails and phone interviews, and thousands of pages of data analysis on community needs, programme outcomes, and each non-profit’s capacity to absorb and make effective use of funding,” she wrote.
Last year she signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away most of her fortune. The Giving Pledge is a commitment by the world’s wealthiest people and families to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back.
“I have a disproportionate amount of money to share,” she wrote in her pledge.
Her ex-husband, Jeff Bezos, in November, also announced he was giving out nearly $800m to 16 groups.
Bezos’ net worth increased by $70bn this year to reach a fortune of $185bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
