Centibillionaire Jeff Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sanchez are back, not aboard the $500 million Koru, but on the boat of benevolence. The power couple is donating $60M to restore land across the U.S. The Amazon co-founder and his helicopter-pilot ladylove announced that the Bezos Earth Fund was donating the generous gift to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation at its gala on Saturday. The grant coincided with the foundation’s 40th anniversary gala in New York City.
“The world is so much better today than it was a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago,” said Bezos. “Except in one way. And that is that the natural world is not as good today as it was 500 years ago, in our preindustrial society. The question is: Can we take that one exception to life not being better and turn it around? And we can.” Sanchez said of the couple’s fund: “Kids don’t want to protect what they don’t know! That’s why I’m so excited about the Bezos Earth Fund’s Greening America’s Cities program and the work they are doing in transforming spaces like parking lots into beautiful parks.”
The Bezos Earth Fund has disbursed $1.7 billion out of the $10 billion since its inception in 2020. Their latest move will restore 1.6 million acres of land across the U.S. Interestingly, the world’s third-richest man, worth $202 billion, is closer to nature than one would imagine. As a child, he spent over a dozen summers working on his grandfather’s ranch in Texas, per CNN.
“I learned so much from my grandfather because he was – and I think this is true of many people in rural areas – very self-reliant [and] very resourceful,” Bezos said during a fireside chat in India. “They can get things done on their own.”
“That kind of self-reliance really made a big impression on me,” Bezos said. Bezos and his grandfather did everything from building fences to fixing equipment themselves. It is incredible to see the tech tycoon take matters into his own hands and try to fix the climate crisis as well.
