Billionaire philanthropist and author MacKenzie Scott announced Tuesday she is giving $640 million to 361 small nonprofits that responded to an open call for applications.
Yield Giving’s first round of donations is more than double what Scott had initially pledged to give away through the application process. Since she began giving away billions in 2019, Scott and her team have researched and selected organizations without an application process and provided them with large, unrestricted gifts.
In a brief note on her website, Scott wrote she was grateful to Lever for Change, the organization that managed the open call, and the evaluators for “their roles in creating this pathway to support for people working to improve access to foundational resources in their communities. They are vital agents of change.”
I know general consensus is fuck billionaires, and I’m not exactly desputing that, but I work in IT for a rural school district and a donation from her foundation allowed the district to set up a foundation and now 50 of our students can attend a local community College on full scholarship each year.
To be fair, she took a billionaire’s (Jeff Bezos) money and is now redistributing $38b of his wealth. She’s one of the good ones.
It was her money too, as she was a core founding member of Amazon, but until their divorce it was locked up in shares.
It does sure seem like she wanted to give a lot of it away, probably for a long time. I’m glad his midlife crisis is helping so many people.
If you look into the matter, she very much helped to earn that money. It’s hers, not taken from anyone.
And we could do the same without the billionaires. Since they don’t create value, we can skip the part where the money goes to them, and directly support our communities. Eliminate billionaires as a drain on our society.
Sure, it’s great, but I’d rather them not have to beg for it and instead take the money they’re leaching from society by force. They should just be forced to give that money in taxes, not have the schools beg for scraps.
Whilst commendable, that is not the job of billionaires.
Other countries have free access to adult education. Some are even paid to attend
Every billionaire’s priority should be to not be a billionaire anymore. She’s doing a great job so far both trying to get to that goal and being an example of what we should expect from these people.
As a side note it should not even be up to them. Billionaires should be taxed enough that it’s not possible to be a billionaire but in the absence of an effective government I’m glad she’s doing this instead.
Billionaires should be taxed enough that it’s not possible to be a billionaire
Disagree. I’m happy for billionaires to be taxed at 80% effective or higher.
100% inheritance tax on billionaires though.
Cool. Please explain how it’s possible for someone to work hard enough to deserve 1000 years worth of earning 1 million dollars a year. That’s 1 billion dollars. No one deserves that kind of money. Period. If you work hard and are very talented you should earn more than others. Fine. A billion dollars though? Not possible to work that hard or be that talented.
Cool. Please explain how it’s possible for someone to work hard enough to deserve 1000 years worth of earning 1 million dollars a year.
Invent something that 1bn people will pay. $1 for.
No one deserves that kind of money.
What is immoral about numbers greater than 10**9 specifically? Plenty of houses in Japan cost more than 1bn JPY.
Not possible to work that hard or be that talented.
Millions of Taylor Swift fans disagree with you.
HOWEVER
My initial statement was based around economics. Billionaires are very mobile and can live almost anywhere in the world. Would we prefer to tax 80% of 100 Billionaires or 100% of zero Billionaires?
Sadly, I suspect some assholes will be along any moment to tell us all about how evil she is and how she’s infecting kids with 5g or some such.
Billionaire philanthropy is undemocratic and governments just need to tax better and put that GDP towards things we prioritize together as nations
But where will we get the classic “Billionaire saves orphans from orphan crushing machine” that never follows up on who built the orphan crushing machine?
Instead we’d just get the classic news headline “Imagine the worst person you can, we found that guy and he’s getting free money from the government welfare program” Which I would add barely happens to most CEOs and billionaires today (they do own most the press, after all)
She’s quite literally the opposite of those evil billionaires. She’s a shining example that should be praised and used as a model.
“But billionnaire bad cause has the money!” is how people typically respond. I don’t even think being able to get billions is bad. The number itself is whatever. Actions are what’s important. A handful of the whatever-naires aren’t steaming piles of ass, so we should support them.
I don’t even think being able to get billions is bad
Translates to
I don’t think exploiting those who work for me is bad
She needs to deposit 10k only my bank account. That’ll take care of my rent for 6 months.
It’s crazy how little it would take to change all our lives.
Mere 2k would put me so far ahead, it’s basically 2 years worth of saving.
And then you try to comprehend what a billion is like and it’s intangible. A million we can imagine, it’s a fancy ass house. But a billion? I simply can’t imagine how much money that is.
20 fancy ass houses in every single state in the USA. I’d never thought of it that way until now and that’s obscene.
Always open your mind to other’s situations. You probably don’t have 4 roommates, but they might. 😉
Trump:hi it’s me your non profit
