Billionaires like Jeff Bezos are creating wealth and then giving it away.
A lot of people like to criticize billionaires like Jeff Bezos, but in my eyes the critiques are mostly motivated by envy.
Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon.com. He revolutionized e-commerce, he has created jobs for millions of people, he has made life so simple by making all kind of items available to be with just a few clicks, items that otherwise would be unavailable to me or very expensive in the form or time and effort to find them.
Whatever amount of billions of dollars he has, he has earned them fairly.
People like to criticize the labor conditions in his warehouses, but funny enough people line up to work at Amazon. Amazon has one of the highest pay for unskilled labor, cities are offer him lucrative deals in order to open a warehouse within their city limits.
Jeff Bezos will give away his now $124 billion dollars. More than 230 of the richest people in the world have promised to donate their money to charitable causes as part of the Giving Pledge, a philanthropy movement started in 2010.
This is one more example of how billionaires inspire us to be the best of ourselves. No one aspire to be a warehouse worker, but million aspire to be then next Jeff Bezos, the next Elon Musk.
Billionaires no only create jobs, goods and services that benefit all of us, but once they get rewarded for their creativity and tenacity, they give it all away.
In 2020, Jeff Bezos pledged to give $10 billion to combat climate change as part of the Bezos Earth Fund. As part of that commitment, Jeff Bezos pledged $2 billion to restore natural habitats and transform food systems at the climate summit in Glasgow last year. Previously, Jeff Bezos’ largest donation was a $2 billion gift to help homeless families and start preschools.
In 1999, the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife at the time, Melinda French Gates, helped usher in a new era of billionaire philanthropy with enormous donations to their namesake foundation. Their close friend Warren E. Buffett, the prominent investor, announced in 2006 that he would give a significant slice of his Berkshire Hathaway shares, valued at the time at $31 billion, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The three then started the Giving Pledge, where billionaires promise to give away at least half their fortunes, as a way to encourage greater generosity among the world’s richest people.
Other signatories have included Michael R. Bloomberg, then the mayor of New York; Mr. Gates’s Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen; and Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan. There are 236 pledgers across 28 countries, according to the Giving Pledge’s website.
Thank You
I can not express enough the gratitude I feel towards Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk for inspiring millions of people. Thank you for the products and service you put in the market, and thank you for the millions of jobs you have created. I am a forever fan.
November 23, 2022: Jeff Bezos is giving $123 million to organizations that work to move homeless families into permanent housing.
The grants to 40 groups in 26 US states and Puerto Rico — ranging from $600,000 to $5 million — are the latest and largest awards from the Amazon.com Inc. co-founder’s Day One Fund, which was founded in 2018. The donations are effective immediately and are part of a $2 billion total commitment to fighting homelessness, the Day One Fund said Tuesday in a statement.