It’s been more than a week since Jeff Bezos announced on Instagram that he was committing $10 billion to fight climate change.
The reception the news received was mixed, as it’s been for other recent megadonations. After Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan pledged 99 percent of their Facebook fortune to philanthropy, I noted in the Chronicle that the response was a blend of “appreciation, apprehension, and ambivalence.” The same could be said for the Bezos Earth Fund.
But there was one novel element added to that mix for Bezos: uncertainty. There has never been a major gift in which the disjuncture between its potential significance and the details attached to it have been greater. When the Chan Zuckerberg pledge was announced, the couple introduced it with an extended essay (presented as a letter to their newborn daughter).
Bezos’s announcement, on the other hand, weighed in at a little more than 120 words, stating his purpose — saving the earth — the financial resources he’d direct to it, a commitment to an open-ended strategic approach, and the fact that he planned to begin issuing grants this summer. That was it.
But what Bezos didn’t say said plenty. With its spareness and its informality, the announcement of the Bezos Earth Fund raised important questions about the nature of the relationship between megadonors and the public. It also highlighted the difference between large-scale gifts getting attention and attracting scrutiny, a crucial distinction to keep in mind given the elevated status of large-scale philanthropy in recent debates over the legitimacy of our economic system.
For those who have been closely following Bezos’s philanthropy, the rollout should not have come as too much of a surprise. In his recent giving, Bezos has sought to cultivate a degree of intimacy between megadonor and public. Long critiqued for his underwhelming philanthropic profile, given his enormous wealth, in 2017, he signaled his intent to begin giving more with a Twitter message soliciting advice from the public on what shape his imminent giving surge should take.
In September 2018, Bezos finally unveiled the details of the $2 billion campaign born out of that solicitation, directed to helping homeless families and constructing a network of preschools. But Bezos has taken a relatively hands-off approach to his giving — a stance at odds with his reputation at Amazon as a fierce micromanager. In fact, if he can be said to have a distinctive philanthropic style at all, it’s his lack of attachment to a single philanthropic structure or strategy. Bezos has a sort of super-store approach to megagiving, which he reiterated in his most recent announcement: The $10 billion would go toward “fund[ing] scientists, activists, NGOs — any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world.” Either he was vowing to throw everything at the problem or he had yet to choose a focus.
In other words, although some commentators assumed that Bezos must be sitting on more concrete plans for his fund and refusing to share them, it’s more likely this was just another example of premature enunciation of philanthropic intent.
Unanswered Questions
Not surprisingly, a torrent of speculation — and free advice — flowed in to fill the gaps Bezos left with his lack of detail. Reporters who covered the announcement practically pleaded for more information from Amazon — which, in the absence of a designated Bezos foundation with communications staff, seemed to be handling publicity.
Recode’s Teddy Schleifer, for instance, posed a series of basic questions prompted by the initial Instagram post. Over what time period would Bezos administer the fund? Will any of the $10 billion be directed to political campaigns? Who would be in charge of the program? Would the Bezos Fund be a private foundation? A limited-liability corporation like the one set up by Chan and Zuckerberg to house philanthropy, advocacy, and business investments? A donor-advised fund? Part of Bezos’s holding company? (The New York Times’s Karen Weise did manage to extract the fact that the fund will provide donations, and not investments, and that it would not be connected to Amazon.)
Schleifer asked, but he didn’t get on-record answers. “We just don’t have further details to share … at the moment,” a company spokesman told him. “Please stay tuned.”
That’s a telling request. On the one hand, it could be interpreted as a call for continued active civic engagement. But it also frames the appropriate public response to a massive philanthropic gift in terms that might be directed to viewers of a television or radio program — more passive media consumers. That blurring suggests that what Bezos likely wanted from the announcement — and what he got — was attention. (There was even speculation that Bezos timed the announcement in anticipation of a Frontline documentary, “Amazon Empire: the Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos,” scheduled to premiere the next day. If that’s the case, it wouldn’t be the first time philanthropy has been used as media prophylactic).
Attention Without Scrutiny
It’s not necessarily a bad thing when a megadonation gets attention. In fact, that possibility is built into campaigns like the Giving Pledge, in which donors are required to make their contributions publicly, to inspire ultra-high-net-worth peers. And it’s quite possible that the announcement of Bezos’s $10 billion commitment, even with its bareboned details, will encourage other billionaires to direct funding to climate change. (There’s always a chance that instead it will lead donors to back away from the cause, under the assumption that “Bezos has got this,” but I think that risk is low.)
But if the roll-out of the Bezos Earth Fund made clear that Bezos was seeking attention, it also made clear that he wasn’t courting scrutiny, a sustained, critical form of attention that requires a modicum of detail and that’s a prerequisite for an engaged citizenry.
In the history of modern philanthropy, attention and scrutiny have long been intertwined. As historian David Greenberg has written, during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the two were more generally conjoined under the term “publicity,” which could refer to something like what we now call transparency and connote an openness to public judgment but which increasingly came to refer to a more promotional variant of “selective, self-serving disclosure.”
Early philanthropy leaders appreciated the ways in which attention and scrutiny could feed off each other, both constructively and antagonistically. John D. Rockefeller, for instance, was initially reluctant to offer up the details of his philanthropy to the public, even when asked by journalists. But the size of his fortune would not allow his giving to remain fully private.
His philanthropy adviser, Frederick Gates, called on him to create a series of philanthropic funds “so large that to become a trustee of one of them is to make a man at once a public character. They should be so large that their administration should be as much a matter of public concern and public inquiry and public criticism as any of the functions of the government are now. They should be so large as to attract the attention of the entire civilized world, their administration becom[ing] the subject of the most intelligent criticism of the world.”
Rockefeller took up this charge with the establishment of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, which actively embraced both meanings of publicity. The Standard Oil magnate caught some flak for this. One Detroit newspaper complained about the constant barrage of press releases it received from the foundation, announcing recent gifts. “Why should these Rockefeller Foundation figures be flaunted before us, advertising the pauperism of our institutions and the paternalism of the gasoline king?” the paper asked.
Rockefeller Foundation secretary Jerome Greene had an answer at the ready, based on the inability to disentangle attention from scrutiny. Publicity regarding foundation grants had become a civic necessity because only by opening up the foundation’s expenditures to the “free criticism” of the people could the public encourage well-designed and socially valuable programs and discourage irresponsible grant making. In other words, Greene was proposing a trade-off: that the public accept a bit of foundation “flaunting” to maintain a watchful, critical scrutiny over large-scale philanthropy.
Legitimizing Wealth
A version of this trade-off was again cited during the deliberations over the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which imposed increased reporting requirements on private foundations. Foundation critics supported those requirements, but so did some of the foundation’s congressional boosters. As Nebraska Senator Carl Curtis, who called himself “a friend of the foundations,” explained on the Senate floor, the requirement that every foundation publish an annual report, accessible to the public, should appeal both to the “harshest critics” of foundations and those who are “profoundly interested” in their welfare. Both had an interest in having the facts of philanthropy out in the open.
Assessing that trade-off has become even more crucial in our current age of megaphilanthropy, not only because of the surge of large-scale gifts but because philanthropy is increasingly invoked as a means of legitimizing concentrated wealth. If Mike Bloomberg, when challenged by Bernie Sanders in a recent debate about whether billionaires like him should exist, can respond, “I worked very hard for [my money] and I’m giving it away,” then the public would need an appreciation of the details of that giving to judge whether it was an adequate rejoinder.
The problem is that in the age of megaphilanthropy, attention and scrutiny are increasingly becoming disjoined. Large-scale philanthropic pledges grab headlines (and capture spots on giving lists) while the details of fulfillment and implementation are put off sometime into the indefinite future. That initial moment of announcement, illuminated by the light of the oversized dollar figure, is the optimal one for the public to take notice of a gift and to apply its scrutiny. But without details, attention is often wasted in abstracted praise or reflexive censure.
This places a much heavier burden on the news media to follow up on pledges, as Recode’s Schleifer has done with Bezos’s giving to address homelessness and the Chronicle has done more generally. It also places a heavier burden on the public itself. We need to maintain our scrutiny even when the gift falls off the front page, and to ensure that when the time comes to incorporate an appraisal of the benefits of large-scale philanthropy into an assessment of the legitimacy of the current economic system, it’s one grounded in the particular realities of philanthropic performance and governance.
In other words, we’ve got to honor the Amazon’s spokesman’s request. We do, in fact, all need to stay tuned — and do so critically.
