The everything donor

MacKenzie Scott is no longer married to Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, but over the last six months, the company she helped him build has profited even while many Americans suffered. Her continuing stake in the retail giant as it makes money hand over fist in a pandemic-constrained world means she’s nearly doubled her net worth in just six months to $62 billion.

And unlike many other filthy rich folks, who donated less than 1% of their wealth to COVID relief, Scott is racing to give her money away. In the last four months, she’s given $4.16 billion in aid to 384 different organizations in every corner of America, among them food pantries and other emergency relief efforts. That’s atop $1.7 billion in donations earlier this year.

We say: Thank you, thank you, including on behalf of the students and faculty at the two CUNY campuses that will benefit from $60 million in her largesse, the biggest-ever private gift to the nation’s largest urban university system.

Her ex-husband looks like Ebenezer Scrooge by comparison. Bezos’s net worth increased 65% since the pandemic began to an astonishing, arguably obscene $182 billion. Yet he’s the only person among the top five richest people in America who has yet to sign on to a pledge to donate half his wealth in his lifetime.

Miserly Bezos, whose wealth would be impossible without the difficult, physical labor of many thousands of warehouse and delivery workers many of whom earn $15 an hour, cut off unlimited unpaid leave for workers despite the pandemic. He stopped paying workers an extra $2 an hour in hazard pay back in May.

Mr. Bezos, why not use your extraordinary success to do more to help suffering Americans, including your own hardworking, essential employees? You can’t take it with you.