I am to understand that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is heading towards dethroning Bill Gates as the world's richest man, sitting on north of $83 billion. Nicely done, sir.
But he hasn't done much charitable giving I am told. At least not on the scale of Gates or Warren Buffett:
He is the only one of the top five billionaires in America who has not signed the Giving Pledge, the promise created by Mr. Gates and Warren Buffett for the superrich to give away at least half of their wealth. He has never appeared on the Philanthropy 50, a list of America’s 50 largest donors, that is published yearly by The Chronicle of Philanthropy. According to public data and news reports, Mr. Bezos and his family have bestowed around $100 million in total on charities — about one-tenth of 1 percent of his fortune.
To figure what to do with all that gigantic Amazon wealth, Bezos took to Twitter to ask the general public about what he should do with the money, with the following proviso:
“I’m thinking about a philanthropy strategy that is the opposite of how I mostly spend my time — working on the long term,” he wrote. “For philanthropy, I find I’m drawn to the other end of the spectrum: the right now.”
I'd prefer he did do something long term, like pilot a guaranteed basic income experiment in Seattle just to see what happens. After all, it is businesses like Amazon that are reducing the necessity of human labor across a wide spectrum of the economy. I'm sure he is seeing that at the Washington Post (he owns it) where printers, delivery men, and inkmakers are all being replaced by probably one content girl. Two at the most.
But ok, here and now.
So, Mr. Bezos, here's what I propose you do:
Go find as many young working mothers as you can, and pay off all their student loans. Just pay off every damn dime and leave them without any student loan debt at all. So that its one less thing they have to worry about while trying to build a family. DON'T give a big number and then have it split up evenly among a bunch of people so that everyone ends up with $500 bucks. Pay EVERYTHING. Do it with fewer people if you have to but you're fuckin loaded so you don't have to.
Normally I wouldn't be telling anyone what to do with their money, but he asked. I don't use Twitter.