Jeff Bezos, will launch a US$2bn fund to help homeless families and low-income communities.
Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, is putting US$2bn into a charitable fund he has established to help the homeless and set up a new network of schools.
The world’s richest man announced the move in a tweet, saying the charity would be called the Day One Fund. Bezos – reportedly worth more than $164bn – has faced criticism for not doing more philanthropic work.
The tech founder unveiled the Bezos Day One Fund on Thursday. He said he would fund existing organisations that aid homeless people and pledged to build new not-for-profit schools to serve low-income communities.
“We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession,” he wrote on Twitter. “The child will be the customer.”
Bezos asked on Twitter last year for suggestions on how he might use his personal fortune, which this year has soared due to Amazon’s surging share price and US tax cuts, the BBC reports.
Earlier this month Amazon, which Mr Bezos founded in 1994, became only the second stock market company to be valued at $1tn. Apple reached that milestone a few weeks earlier.
Despite the huge amount of money being given, it is far less than the philanthropy of other billionaires such as Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has donated tens of billions to his foundation, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has pledged to donate 99% of his shares in the social media giant to an organization focused on public good.
Bezos, who is worth nearly as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett combined, said his “families fund” would issue annual leadership awards to civic groups doing “compassionate, needle-moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families”.
