Twitter CEO and founder Jack Dorsey is committing 28% of his personal wealth to coronavirus relief through his philanthropic fund.
The move could be the largest from a single individual for coronavirus relief. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has also offered more than $25m to help research through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Dorsey will transfer his equity in his digital payments group Square, totalling around $1bn. The fund will focus on health and education for girls and ‘universal basic income’ efforts when the pandemic is over.
Dorsey revealed in a series of tweets that he would transfer his equity in his digital payments group Square to his limited liability corporation Start Small, contributing around 28% of his overall wealth.
I’m moving $1B of my Square equity (~28% of my wealth) to #startsmall LLC to fund global COVID-19 relief. After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education, and UBI. It will operate transparently, all flows tracked here: https://t.co/hVkUczDQmz
— jack (@jack) April 7, 2020
Dorsey’s first pledge went to an initiative co- called America’s Food Fund that works to provide food to the needy during the coronavirus crisis and was launched by the Ford Foundation as well as Apple, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Companies and wealthy celebrities and personalities are increasingly stepping up to add their financial support to fill in gaps in the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic (of which there are many), and people are increasingly paying attention to, especially in the case of individual wealthy donors, how much they’re giving relative to their ability.
For example, Dorsey’s gift is being widely measured against a recent one from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose $100 million gift to the nonprofit Feeding America, was recently announced.
Jack Dorsey says he will give $1 billion to help with #COVID19 relief efforts. Around 28% of his wealth.
Jeff Bezos, incidentally, donated $100 million to Feeding America, a food poverty NGO. That is… 0.1% of his wealth.https://t.co/0quxV6hEf7
— Hannah Jane Parkinson (@ladyhaja) April 7, 2020
The donation comes as Coronavirus deaths in the United States soared over 12,800 on Tuesday.