Reuters/Joshua Roberts
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
- Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $114 billion.
- Bezos' most recent - and biggest - donation was the launch of a $2 billion fund in September, but he's been criticized for not giving away more.
- The Amazon CEO is the only American among the world's five richest people who has not signed the the Giving Pledge, in which participants promise to give away more than half of their wealth during their lifetime or in their will.
- These are the donations Bezos is known to have made since becoming a billionaire in 1997.
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos may be the richest person in the world, but he isn't well-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 lifetime or in their will.
Among the five richest people in America, Jeff Bezos - with a net worth of $114 billion - is the only one who hasn't signed onto the philanthropic commitment.
It's not clear why Bezos has avoided joining the Giving Pledge, an initiative started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet 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 bearing Bezos's 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 reportedly hasn't received contributions from Jeff Bezos himself.
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 $2 billion fund for education programs for the homeless. Still, that donation reportedly represented only about 1.3% of his net worth at the time.
Here are all the major donations Jeff Bezos is known to have given to charity since becoming a billionaire in 1997: