Foreign Property News | Posted by Shwe Zin Win
The world’s richest people are being urged to urgently donate big chunks of their fortunes to the global effort to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, and help millions of people across the globe whose lives have been thrown into crisis by Covid-19.
Some billionaires – including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey – have committed huge amounts of their money to fund solutions to the unfolding crisis.
But other members of the wealthy elite have been criticised for pledging only small fractions – if any - of their fortunes to address the worst-ever global health emergency, which is set to trigger an economic crisis on the scale of the 1930s Great Depression.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest person, has donated $100m (£80m) to food bank charity Feeding America. The charity, which runs a network of about 200 food banks, said Bezos’s donation was the biggest it had ever received, and “countless lives will be changed because of his generosity”.
However, critics pointed out that the $100m donation made public by Bezos represents less than 0.1% of his estimated $123bn fortune.
Fran Perrin, a daughter of supermarket heir and philanthropist Lord Sainsbury, said now was the time for billionaires such as Bezos to start “giving back to society in the biggest way possible”.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged an immediate $100m towards detection, isolation and vaccine development. Gates has said he is prepared to spend billions in the longer term to develop and produce a vaccine. “It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better,” Gates said on The Daily Show. “But a few billion in this, the situation we’re in, where there’s trillions of dollars ... being lost economically, it is worth it.”
Jack Dorsey pledged to donate $1bn (£800m) to fund coronavirus research to help “disarm this pandemic”. Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006 and went on to co-found payments company Square, is donating $1bn of Square shares to a charitable fund, called Start Small, to “fund global Covid-19 relief”. He said the donation was about “28% of my wealth.
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, has committed $30m to the Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust’s joint research project, the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. Zuckerberg has an estimated $67bn fortune.
Jack Ma, China’s richest person, has pledged 100m yuan ($14.5m) to “support the development of a coronavirus vaccine”. Ma has an estimated $44bn fortune.
Ref: Theguardian
