MacKenzie Bezos and a Cryptocurrency Billionaire Among New Giving Pledge Signers

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Ben Delo, a 35-year-old British cryptocurrency billionaire who lives in Hong Kong and has high hopes of protecting humanity from what he sees as some of the greatest threats it faces, is among the 19 people who have signed the Giving Pledge recently, it was announced Tuesday.

Also new to the list; MacKenzie Bezos, a writer who helped start Amazon with her former husband, Jeff Bezos, who has not signed the Giving Pledge.

In her letter to the Giving Pledge organization, Mackenzie Bezos said she will be thoughtful in her philanthropy, but she will also act with urgency.

“I have no doubt that tremendous value comes when people act quickly on the impulse to give,” she wrote.

She also wrote about the importance of providing support to family and friends, noting that everyone has something they can share with others.

“We each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand,” she wrote. “In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share.”

Catastrophic Threats

Delo says he plans to donate the bulk of his wealth to support nonprofits and programs working to stop catastrophic threats like nuclear war and extreme climate change and target risks connected to emerging technologies such as biological weapons and advanced artificial intelligence. Delo made the announcement when he signed the Giving Pledge on April 15.

“We’ve never been in this position before, with the power to destroy the future but not necessarily the wisdom to wield that power responsibly,” said Delo in his Giving pledge letter.

The Giving Pledge is the effort launched in 2010 by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage more of the world’s wealthiest people to commit to giving at least half of their riches to charity.

Other recent signers include the following U.S. philanthropists:

• Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp, who now leads the Signal Technology Foundation, and his wife, Tegan
• Brian Armstrong, who co-founded Coinbase, a cryptocurrency company
• Stewart Bainum, a hotelier, and his wife, Sandy
• Paul Tudor Jones, who founded the hedge fund Tudor Capital Management, and his wife, Sonia
• Ryan (Jume) Jumonville, who owns the holding company Derbyshire Group and chairs United Networks of America, a medical discount-card company
• Jeff Lawson, who has co-founded a number of technology companies including Twilio and NineStar, and his wife, Erica, a pediatric rheumatologist
• Francine LeFrak, a theater and film producer, and her husband Rick Friedberg, who leads the consulting firm Liberty Connections
• Mitchell Rales, who co-founded the Danaher Corporation holding company, and his wife, Emily
• Chris and Crystal Sacca, who together founded the venture-capital firm Lowercase Capital
• Paul Sciarra, who co-founded Pinterest, and his wife, Jennifer
• Robert Toll, who co-founded the luxury homebuilding company Toll Brothers, and his wife, Jane

Signatories from other countries include:

• Sheikh Dr. Mohammed Bin Musallam Bin Ham Al-Ameri
• Jeremy and Hanne Grantham
• Daoming Liu
• David and Claudia Harding
• John and Marcy McCall MacBain
• Nicolai and Katja Tangen

Michael Sakas

Early Start

Despite his relative youth, Delo, like many of the other recent Giving Pledge signers, is not entirely new to philanthropy. Last year he gave about $6.3 million to his alma mater, University of Oxford’s Worcester College, for endowment and to support two teaching fellowships, one in mathematics and one in computer science, and he told the Chronicle via email that he gave approximately $1.9 million to a British charity that helps students on the autism spectrum.

In addition, a spokeswoman said he has given more than $3 million to charities through Effective Giving, a British nonprofit that advises donors and connects them with researchers, foundations, and other experts to help them make decisions about their philanthropy.

He has also supported the Center for Human Compatible AI, a research hub run by the University of California at Berkeley that is working to develop tools and practices to reorient the thrust of AI research toward benefiting humanity rather than endangering it. Delo has also given to a joint effort by Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Future of Humanity Institute aimed at lessening and preventing global pandemics.

He said in an email that he decided to sign the giving pledge for the “unparalleled opportunity to learn from more established donors, exchange knowledge on how to give effectively, and to help foster a culture of commitment, openness, and transparency in philanthropy. I hope to inspire others to follow in my footsteps.”

Delo said he also plans to join the Open Philanthropy Project, a research organization and grant maker founded by the philanthropists Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz, that follows and measures the results of its grants and publishes the findings on its website. Through the project, Delo said he plans to back efforts to fight global catastrophic risks like the threat of nuclear war and disasters caused by climate change.

A mathematician and computer scientist by training, Delo is one of three co-founders of BitMEX, a cryptocurrency trading platform that is reportedly valued at more than $3 billion. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 2005 and worked as an engineer for IBM. He then moved into the finance sector and developed high-frequency trading systems for the London hedge fund GSA Capital and for banking giant J.P. Morgan.

In addition to signing the Giving Pledge, Delo plans to join Giving What We Can, an “effective altruism” nonprofit founded at Oxford by the ethics researcher Toby Ord, whose members pledge to give 10 percent of their income to effective charities.