Interestingly, it looks like she has done a more than passable job at targeting her donations to maximize long-term social benefits. Even her donations to "arts and cultural institutions" (a field where the vast majority of charitable donations are mammoth exercises in wasteful frivolity) are actually targeted towards institutions operating in highly challenging community contexts, where arts and culture funding is a very plausible mechanism to jump-start development of high-quality social capital and community ties. So, a remarkably good job overall.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but in some areas I believe it is much better to invest the money in a sustainable business selling a product rather than giving that product away. That preserves profit and loss indicators and allows decision makers to judge the value their end users are receiving.<p>Education can be an example of that. Making a really cheap, high quality school is much better than funding tuition in existing schools. A school that manages to retain costumers indicates that they value the school so much there's nowhere better to spend the money. However if the school is "free" they might as well just go for it even if they don't get much out of it.
While I am generally in favor of very heavy taxation of wealth rather than hoping for favors from the ultra-rich in their generous moods, I am happy that at least (unlike taxes) none of this money went to the military.
Interesting that Scott has asked for the focus to be on the organisations not her. <a href="https://mackenzie-scott.medium.com/seeding-by-ceding-ea6de642bf" rel="nofollow">https://mackenzie-scott.medium.com/seeding-by-ceding-ea6de64...</a>
I wonder sometimes if the marital law we have rn isn't a bit bizarre in the disbursement of half of the wealth of the "family", where 99.99% of that wealth is from one of the people.<p>I don't imagine I'll ever be Jeff Bezos, but I would feel pretty weird if I became an independent billionaire by divorcing my wife.<p>It's a hot topic, but I would appreciate some discussion on it.
I wish she would give to governments :-/<p>There are thousands of governments in the US (and many more globally). Towns, cities, counties and states and of course the federal government. Many of these governments are accountable and effective in a way that charities aren't.
Instead of all these social (justice) causes, I wish these billionaires would just build out our clean energy infrastructure and lobby to destroy our fossil fuel infrastructure.<p>Putting that $2.7b into Tesla shares would probably achieve more for the planet.<p>Meanwhile, we continue to throw money at problematic regions and peoples of the planet, for little apparent result apart from establishing a multi-generational and potentially endless reliance of those groups on massive continued aid flows.<p>The regions of the world where people have been truly uplifted - eg. Bangladesh and China - are the results of old-fashioned foreign investment and the hard work and adoption of Western culture and technology of the local populations and Governments, with no aid or donations in sight.