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--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: Welcome to In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Duarte Giraldeen. Every weekend, we talk with the journalists behind the best stories on Apple News+. Today on In Conversation, we're talking with Belinda Luscombe. She's editor-at-large for Time magazine.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: Luscombe recently wrote a profile of billionaire philanthropist Mackenzie Scott. After Scott's divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, she became one of the richest people in the world. Mackenzie Scott got 4% of Amazon's stocks. So as you can imagine, that's quite a lot of money. So it depends on what the stock price was doing that day. But estimates put it at somewhere around $37 billion.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: That's right.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: But Scott is making headlines for her unique version of charitable giving. She's donated more than $8.5 billion in less than a year. And just last week, Scott announced her latest slew of donations in a post on Medium. This time, she's giving away another $2.7 billion to 286 organizations, and all of them are listed in that post.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: That's right.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: Luscombe's article in Time is called The Giving Spree. You can read and listen to it on Apple News with an Apple News Plus subscription. Luscombe wrote about what makes Scott's model of giving distinct from her billionaire peers and how her background may be informing how she approaches philanthropy.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: That's right.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: But Scott is also known to be a private person who seems to avoid the spotlight, which made writing an article about her rather difficult. And that's where my conversation with Luscombe started. So you never spoke with Mackenzie Scott directly.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: No, I didn't.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: How did you go about this reporting? Your work is so incredibly in-depth. How did you do that without speaking with her?
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: Well, mostly it was a painful number of emails and unreturned phone calls. So I often say that writing a profile is like dating somebody because you maybe go out with them one time and then you think about them incessantly and you try to wonder about them. Why do they do the things they do? It's a very intimate process. And this one, writing this profile of Mackenzie was a bit like dating or having a crush on someone that doesn't even know you exist because I had to just ask a lot of people about her background, research her as much as I could.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That makes sense.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: There's, you know, whatever is written about her. She used to be a little more public. So I spent a lot of time looking at the interviews she had done. And then I just began to do huge Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, any searches I could for people who were in her vicinity. So people who went to Hotchkiss, people who went to Princeton, people who worked at Amazon when she worked at Amazon. And I began to call those people up and ask them if they'd be prepared to talk about her and if they had any insights into her.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: In your article, you dig into Scott's life story. She wasn't born a billionaire, but she didn't come from nothing either. What is it about her background that perhaps influences her outlook today?
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: Mackenzie grew up quite wealthy. Her father was a financial advisor. But just as she was finishing high school, she went to a boarding school. Her father ran afoul of the SEC and they accused him of mismanaging people's money. He had to declare bankruptcy and he was never allowed to practice in that field again. So they were pretty much wiped out. And so when she went to Princeton, she had to go with financial aid. But on top of that, she also had to do kind of regular odd jobs like waitressing and retail in order to be able to supplement and live.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's fascinating.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: She had a privileged background to a point and then suddenly had to be much more resourceful and her wealth plummeted. However, she did get a Princeton education, which is worth quite a lot. And she particularly was a great writer. She'd always been a great writer. She'd loved writing. And when she was at Princeton, she got into this class that was a creative writing class is very, very competitive. And it was taught by Toni Morrison, the legendary Toni Morrison. And Toni Morrison would later say that she was one of the best, if not the best writing student that she'd ever had, which as you can imagine, with all those kids coming through Princeton was quite some praise.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's amazing.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: And indeed, Dr. Morrison blurbed one of Mackenzie's books, her first book, you know, one of those praiseworthy sentences or two that appear on the back of a book.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: It's interesting, you know, one can only speculate, but you'd think that being a writer and being married to the guy who owned the world's biggest bookstore would be an advantage. But I think it turned out to be a disadvantage because I think, you know, and again, I have to stress I did not speak to Mackenzie, but she's quite shy and not very good at self-promotion. It's not something she enjoys. So I think she felt it was difficult to manage both those things, to be like she did not take full advantage of what would appear to be the inherent promotional value of that.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: She's so mysterious about how she's choosing to give away money. She's essentially giving away money the way most people give away 10 or 20 bucks to their local charity. But her size gifts are enormous. What's the criteria she's using?
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: The only things that she has said about the criteria she's using are in posts that she put up on Medium, the website where anybody can post if they want to. And I would encourage everybody to read these because she's a writer and so they're very beautiful. She talks about the glass-winged butterfly. And the glass-winged butterfly is a tiny little animal that can carry many times its weight.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's a great analogy.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: And I think she gave to organisations, she didn't give to really big ones and she didn't really give to really small ones, but she gave to sort of middle-of-the-road organisations that were being particularly effective. She gives unrestricted gifts. This is very unusual in the philanthropic world. You know, for example, somebody has called up and said, so we need you just to fill out this little form and explain some things because there's a philanthropist who wants to give you some money. So these people do that and then suddenly they get these enormous gifts and they're unrestricted, which means that the organizations who get the gifts can do whatever they want with them, whatever they want with them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's a huge difference.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: So the head of the Bureau of Manhattan Community College, which is the biggest community college in New York City. He got a gift of $30 million. $30 million. I mean that life for an organization like BMCC. BMCC is the next biggest gift he ever got is a million and that was over five years. Usually when philanthropists give away the gifts they say we want this spent on green causes or we would like you to build this. I know you need a warehouse, so please build this warehouse. And if you'd like, you can call it the Belinda Luscom warehouse.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's a great point.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: So those are the kind of gifts people usually give away. But what Mackenzie said was, here's the money, you know best what you need, and we trust you to spend it on what you need. Why would she choose BMCC as opposed to some of these centers of privilege where she was educated, you know, her high school, her very, very elite college?
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's a great question.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: Again, she does not explain in detail why these things happen, but the head of BMCC said he believed it's because of the kind of people that BMCC serves. He said the majority of his student population is female, it's female of colour, and it's head of household. So when the pandemic hit, these women who were trying to get educated while looking after their children lost a lot of their income. They lost a lot of their hours and had to scale back their education in order to go out and find work, in order to put food on the table.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's heartbreaking.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: The head of BMCC also said that some of his student population had found themselves homeless during the pandemic. So the money she gave was targeted directly at people who were hit really hard by an event that happened that was outside their control and prevented them from getting their education. And I believe it's because of her experience at Princeton, where she did not have enough money to take full advantage of what Princeton had to offer because she had to work, that made her particularly sympathetic to the plight of the students at BMCC.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's a great insight.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: And she gave a lot of money away to community colleges, which are typically considered the sort of lesser of all the colleges, and a lot of money away to historically black colleges and universities, and generally to the less elite institutions that are overlooked when people are giving endowments.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: In terms of control, some people would say, and it's pretty offensive to hear the criticism, that she's given this money away because she didn't earn it. What's your response to that?
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: Well, do any of us really earn our money? I mean, there is, and she talks about this, there is some portion of luck that goes into the making of any fortune. And she says that. Yes. Did she get lucky that she married Jeffrey Bezos? Yes. But she did work at Amazon. And a lot of the people who worked at Amazon, no matter what they were doing in those early days, retired because they were given stock options. So many fortunes, people are just born into them or in the right place at the right time or got the right education. So I do find those to be very weird criticisms.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's a great point.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: I think what's relevant is what do you do with the hand that you've been dealt? What do you do with the position that you find yourself in? You know, there's that great biblical story, right, about the widow's mite, how Jesus is looking at the guy who gives away a lot of money and then the woman who just gives away one tiny little bit of money, but it represents a bigger part of her fortune. So I think the really interesting thing is that she intends to give away every last penny. She has more money today than before she started giving her money away because the pandemic did such amazing things to the Amazon stock. And she says she's going to give it away till there's none left.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's incredible.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: And so this gets at the core of how she's upending these norms of philanthropy and charitable giving. What is it about her approach that's so unexpected? I mean, what do you see as the lasting impacts here?
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: She has thrown a spotlight on all these organizations that are doing good and that are underloved. That is one thing that's working here. And she really encourages people in her Medium post. She says, I've done the heavy lifting here. I've figured out with the help of this, she used a management consulting company. I figured out the organizations that are really effective. So if you have some money to give away, here are some organizations that you could give it to.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: One of the guys, his name is Ibu Patel, and he runs an organisation that tries to get people of different faiths, of Muslims and Christians and Buddhists, to talk to each other and begin to understand each other and have empathy for each other's beliefs. And he says it's always been very hard to raise money because people don't really understand empathy as a sort of philanthropic cause. They understand the environment, they understand poverty, but it's been a very amorphous kind of a, what does this even mean? Does she legitimize it? She legitimized it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's a great point.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: Another thing I think she's showing is that you don't have to be insane. I mean, she is insanely wealthy, but you don't have to start like a foundation, like the Rockefellers and Melons, they have foundations. Most billionaires set up a foundation. Gates is obviously a very famous one, the Gates Foundation or Melinda Gates has one called Pivotal Ventures. And you hire a staff and they do the research and they gather in the applications for funding. And then they figure out with that staff who is going to get funding. And the whole thing has, it's very institutional. You know, the philanthropic industry in America is like a trillion dollar business. And other people as you said just have these tax avoidance strategies particularly with these things called donor advised funds where they put money in a normal fund that makes interest and at some point when they have time or inspiration they say, you know what, let's give the money away to this organization and it is given away by putting the money in that fund they avoid taxes on that money.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: That's a great point.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: But she didn't do that. It was very in some ways a much more direct strategy which is find an organisation that you think is doing good work and support it. And I think that's maybe a very simple way that people can be inspired. Not everybody, of course, can manage giving away. But I think as we come out of the pandemic and wonder, well, what was this all about? And, you know, what do we do now? One of the things that I think she has shown is that we can help people. There's a pandemic that has highlighted very clearly who the vulnerable people are and how vulnerable they are. And we, as those people who have something, can really zero in on who those vulnerable people are and help out.
--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: Thank you so much for joining us, Belinda.
--:-- Belinda Luscombe: My pleasure.
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--:-- Duarte Giraldeen: Luscombe's article on Mackenzie Scott is available now for Apple News Plus subscribers. iPhone users can subscribe on the Apple News app.
