Jeff Bezos is giving his fortune away. The billionaire Amazon founder and his partner Lauren Sánchez plan to donate the majority of his $124 billion net worth to charity within his lifetime, he said in a CNN interview on Saturday.
Bezos and Sánchez began that process, in part, by announcing that musician Dolly Parton is the third winner of the $100 million Courage and Civility Award.
“When you think of Dolly,” Sánchez said to CNN, “look, everyone smiles, right? She is just beaming with light. And all she wants to do is bring light into other people’s worlds. And so we couldn’t have thought of someone better than to give this award to Dolly, and we know she’s going to do amazing things with it.”
Reacting to the award in a tweet, Parton said she hopes “to do good things with this money.”
“I try to put my money where my heart is,” she wrote on Saturday.
The award was previously given to chef Jose Andrés for his work making meals for Ukrainians and to climate advocate Van Jones. It is conferred without warning and is meant to honor those who have been courageous and unifying figures.
Bezos has come under fire in the past for not signing the Giving Pledge, a public declaration from the the world’s richest citizens that they will give the majority of their fortunes to charity. MacKenzie Scott, his ex-wife, signed it in 2019.
In the interview on Saturday, Bezos said that he plans to give the majority of his wealth away during his lifetime, but didn’t share any details as to how or when that might happen. He has already committed $10 billion over 10 years to the climate-focused Bezos Earth Fund, which is chaired by Sánchez.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “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.”
By contrast, Scott has shaken up the philanthropy world by giving away almost $4 billion in less than a year.
