21st Century Fortunes - Give Away Now, Later, Or Plow Into Foundations?

In her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Scott received about 25% of the couple’s Amazon stake—roughly 4% of Amazon at the time. Since then she’s given away about $16 billion to nonprofits and today is worth ~$36 billion. Had she simply held the original stake and not donated or sold, she'd be worth on the order of $95 billion today.

Here’s the paradox: if she had waited and then decided, right now, to keep $36B, she could in theory give away $60B—far more than the $16B already given. That’s the power of compounding on a large fortune.

So that's an argument for holding onto wealth.

The rebuttal? Good works also compound, just less visibly. Teenagers who got help in 2019 are healthier adults this year; communities strengthened early create more opportunity later. Like private capital, social returns also accumulate.

There is another fascinating question about the incredible fortunes that have been created this century. Will these fortunes simply be passed along to children or will they become financing for great public works through charities?

If more billionaires emulate John D. Rockefeller—who channeled vast wealth into institutions that underwrote breakthroughs like the agricultural research that helped catalyze the Green Revolution—we could see a wave of big-budget nonprofits transforming the world over the next 10–30 years. (When Rockefeller died in 1937, the world population was about 2.3 billion; today it’s about 8 billion—~3.5× —with higher crop yields a key part of how we’ve fed more people. Those higher crop yields were at least partly attributable to research sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.) 

Bill Gates seems to be emulating Rockefeller in a fascinating way: he's essentially become an entrepreneur of social causes, measuring success not by gains in financial capital but by gains in human and social capital. 

The future will in no small part be defined by how these great fortunes of the 21st century are used.

The choice isn’t simply now versus later. It’s how to balance the compounding of capital with the compounding of impact—and how to design philanthropy so that both work in the world’s favor. This feels like a conversation we're not having but that could be so consequential.