Why has Jeff Bezos not signed on to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge?

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may be the world’s richest person, but he isn’t known for his billion-dollar donations and philanthropic efforts like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

Additional light was recently shed on Bezos’ charitable donations after news that his ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, had signed the Giving Pledge, in which participants promise to give away more than half of their wealth during their lifetimes or in their wills.

Among the five richest people in America, Jeff Bezos, who has a net worth of US$114 billion, is the only one who hasn’t signed on to the philanthropic commitment.

It’s not clear why Bezos has avoided joining the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett almost a decade ago. His charitable history has “remained largely a mystery”, The New York Times wrote in 2017 after Bezos posted a “request for ideas” for philanthropy on Twitter.

A nonprofit organisation bearing Bezos’ last name, the Bezos Family Foundation, has given millions of dollars to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. However, the fund is run entirely by the Amazon CEO’s parents and hasn’t received contributions from Bezos himself, according to Inside Philanthropy.

Additionally, Bezos had never appeared on the annual list of America’s 50 largest donors until 2018, when he took the top spot with the launch of a US$2 billion fund for education programmes for the homeless. Still, that donation represented only about 1.3 per cent of his net worth at the time, according to Quartz.

Here are all the major donations Bezos is known to have given to charity since becoming a billionaire in 1997:

August 2011: US$10 million to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.