USA: The founder of leading e-comm company Amazon and one of the world’s richest people Jeff Bezos has announced that he has plans to give away his lifetime wealth of about $124 billion to charitable trusts. This announcement is made soon after news of Amazon’s mass layoff of employees came in just a few days back. According to reports, Bezos revealed his plans while giving an interview to a popular News Channel. He was present there along with his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez who was a journalist earlier and has now turned into a philanthropist.
While answering questions in the interview, Jeff was asked whether he has plans to give away his wealth as a charity, to which he responded, “Yeah, I do.” Then he added, “The hard part is figuring out how to do it in a levered way.” This is the first time that Bezos has announced any such move. He said he wants to uplift and support people who are divided through political and social divisions. His announcement has irked some people in the social media fraternity. They demanded that rather than giving away the money to charity, Bezos should look after the well-being of the employees that his company plans to lay off.
Lauren and Jeff have been dating since 2019 after he parted ways with his wife MacKenzie Scott in the same year. On asking further about his plan and his girlfriend’s involvement in the same, Jeff clarified, “It’s not easy. Building Amazon was not easy. It took a lot of hard work, a bunch of very smart teammates, hard-working teammates, and I’m finding — and I think Lauren is finding the same thing — that charity, philanthropy, is very similar. There are a bunch of ways that I think you could do ineffective things, too. So you have to think about it carefully and you have to have brilliant people on the team.”
Notably, the Amazon Founder has given Singer Dolly Parton an award of $100 million as a recipient of his “courage and civility” award. He feels she will direct the money to charitable causes in a better manner.