- MacKenzie Scott donated $2.15 billion to hundreds of charities this past year CNN
- Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gives $2.6 million to bring easier health care access to south Minneapolis KARE11.com
- MacKenzie Scott donated $2 billion to charity this year—or a total of $16.5 billion since starting her quest to give away everything ‘until the safe is empty’ Fortune
- Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott surprises six more Twin Cities nonprofits with $26.1M in gifts Star Tribune
- MacKenzie Scott gifts $1.5 million to San Antonio’s Project QUEST San Antonio Express-News
Tag Archives: charities
Buffett gives more than $750M in Berkshire shares to charities
Warren Buffett certainly sees this as the season of giving.
The billionaire investor donated more than $750 million in Berkshire Hathaway stock on Wednesday to the four foundations run by his family.
Wednesday’s donations mark the first time the 92-year-old has made a second major gift within the same year.
Buffett gives annual gifts to five charities each summer, but this extra round of giving didn’t include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
WARREN BUFFETT PORTRAIT: HIGH-TECH ART RAISES $75K FOR CHARITY
Buffett started giving annual donations to the same five charities in 2006 when he unveiled a plan to give away his fortune over time, with the Gates Foundation receiving the biggest donations.
A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed Buffett gave 1.5 million Class B shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his first wife.
He also gave 300,000 Class B shares apiece to the three foundations run by his children: the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation.
In June, he gave 11 million Class B shares to the Gates Foundation, 1.1 million B shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and 770,218 shares apiece to his children’s three foundations.
WARREN BUFFETT’S FINAL CHARITY LUNCH SETS EBAY RECORD
It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the new donations this week.
The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation has been a major supporter of abortion rights, making large gifts to Planned Parenthood and other groups.
Buffett hasn’t announced any changes in his giving plans since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.
Susie Buffett, 69, uses her Sherwood Foundation to strengthen early childhood education and support a number of projects around Buffett’s hometown of Omaha where she also lives.
BUFFETT GIVES $4.1B TO CHARITY, STEPS DOWN FROM GATES FOUNDATION’S BOARD
Howard Buffett, 67, is helping farmers in impoverished nations produce more and working to end world hunger with his namesake foundation.
Peter Buffett, 64, has dedicated his NoVo Foundation to empowering women and girls worldwide through education, collaboration and economic development to end violence against women.
Even after these latest gifts, Buffett still controls more than 31% of Berkshire’s voting power.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Dolly Parton awarded $100 million from Jeff Bezos to give to charities of her choice
Dolly Parton just got $100 million richer — thanks to Jeff Bezos.
Bezos selected Parton as the 2022 recipient of his Courage and Charities Award, as an individual who “leads with her heart.”
While the funds she acquired do not go towards her personal fortune, they will and can go to any organization(s) of Parton’s choice.
JEFF BEZOS, JAY-Z TO MAKE OFFER FOR COMMANDERS: REPORT
Lauren Sánchez, Bezos’ girlfriend, noted that the award “recognizes leaders who aim high, find solutions, and always do it with civility.”
Bezos applauded Parton, 76, for all that “she’s done for kids, literacy, and so many other things.”
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Creating The Dollywood Foundation in 1988, Parton has prioritized education in youth. From this, The Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was born, which predominately offers books to young children and scholarships to high school students. In 2016, she established The My People Fund, to help those impacted by fire in Sevier Country, her hometown county.
“When people are in a position to help, you should help,” Parton stated, upon accepting the award.
“I know that I’ve always said, I try to put my money where my heart is. And I think you do the same thing,” she said to Bezos. “I will do my best to do good things with this money,” she added.
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In addition to her own organization, Parton has helped to fund The LeConte Medical Center in Sevierville, Tennessee, as well as the COVID-19 vaccine produced by Moderna.
Elon Musk’s Inner Circle Rocked by Fight Over His $230 Billion Fortune
Mr. Birchall, a straight-laced, 48-year-old wealth manager who rose to become Mr. Musk’s top deputy and the head of his family office, had growing concerns about a new power player in the
Tesla Inc.
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CEO’s orbit.
Mr. Musk was increasingly relying on a new adviser, a 34-year-old, Russian-born ex-professional gambler named
Igor Kurganov.
Mr. Kurganov spent some of the pandemic sleeping in Mr. Musk’s home, where they chatted late into the night about how the world’s richest person might use his fortune to help shape the planet through a giving strategy known as “effective altruism.”
Mr. Kurganov had no experience in finance or security but was suddenly a central figure in both areas for Mr. Musk. He had moved from London to Texas and replaced some of Mr. Musk’s protection detail with new hires of his own. Not long after, the Tesla CEO told Mr. Birchall that he was so taken by the younger man’s ideas that he wanted to leave him in charge of his charitable giving, dispersing funds from Mr. Musk’s vast private fortune, currently around $230 billion, as he saw fit.
“Elon,” Mr. Birchall told his boss, according to three people briefed afterward. “You can’t.”
The clash between the two men, and their dueling efforts to gain the upper hand with Mr. Musk, provides a peek into the often tumultuous private workings of Mr. Musk’s inner circle. As Mr. Musk’s breakneck, $44 billion bid for Twitter shows, the entrepreneur can be prone to quick decisions, ones that he can reverse just as quickly as he makes them. That deal is now in peril, with Mr. Musk trying to walk away and
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suing him to complete it.
All the while he is egged on by a rotating crew of investors, underlings and ever-changing friends whose power and personal wealth is closely tied to their proximity to Mr. Musk, according to people who do business with him.
Two men in particular have pulled the Tesla CEO in opposing directions.
Mr. Birchall is an Eagle Scout and practicing Mormon who doesn’t smoke or drink and grew up traveling California as part of a song-and-dance troupe called “The Birchall Family Singers.” He declined to be interviewed through a representative of Mr. Musk’s foundation.
Mr. Kurganov is a high-roller with a reported more than $18 million in poker winnings, with long hair and beard and a peaceful demeanor. He has said in a podcast interview that he dropped out of college because he was smoking too much marijuana. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Last winter, Mr. Musk came to a compromise between the two. He allowed Mr. Kurganov to oversee $5.7 billion in Tesla shares that the CEO pledged late last year to eventually donate to charity. The rest of Mr. Musk’s overall fortune remained under Mr. Birchall’s purview.
That decision wasn’t, however, the end of the fracas.
This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people close to Messrs. Musk, Birchall and Kurganov, including associates of the Musk Foundation and investors.
Ultimate fixer
For a man of immense resources, Mr. Musk is a minnow in the world of big-dollar philanthropy. Compared with other magnates such as
Microsoft Corp.
co-founder
Bill Gates
and
Amazon.com Inc.
founder
Jeff Bezos,
whose wealth, like Mr. Musk’s, is tied up in shares of their companies, Mr. Musk has said little concrete about his approach to giving. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Musk’s personal foundation gave away $23.6 million in fiscal 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, filings show. That represented roughly 0.02% of his net worth as of the end of that year, according to Forbes rankings.
Though Mr. Musk is known to favor his own counsel most of all, the man in charge of his foundation since 2016 has been Mr. Birchall, one of the longest standing in his inner circle.
The alliance reflects Mr. Birchall’s role as the ultimate fixer for Mr. Musk, taking care of matters large and small. In addition to handling billions in assets, Mr. Birchall in 2018 under a pseudonym registered the website www.justballs.com, for example, after Mr. Musk mused online that he might want to own the domain name someday, legal documents show.
Mr. Birchall entered the technology world through finance. After his brief singing stint with his siblings—he is one of 11 children—he attended Brigham Young University.
He then spent a year at Merrill Lynch, where he was discharged for what the firm described in a filing as “sending correspondence to a client without management approval.”
Mr. Birchall eventually moved into private wealth and crossed paths with Mr. Musk about a decade ago while working as a client adviser in
Morgan Stanley’s
southern California offices. There, he impressed Mr. Musk by helping arrange hundreds of millions of dollars of loans from the investment bank at a time when the Tesla co-founder was strapped for cash, a person close to Mr. Musk says. When Mr. Musk started a private firm to manage his own money roughly six years ago, he tapped Mr. Birchall to run it.
Mr. Birchall’s work for Mr. Musk has at times led him into strange public controversies and lawsuits. After a British spelunker criticized Mr. Musk’s offer to help rescue a youth soccer team trapped in a flooded Thailand cave in 2018, Mr. Birchall created a fake email address under the name “James Brickhouse” to hire a private investigator to investigate the man, according to court documents.
Mr. Musk subsequently called the man “pedo guy” in a tweet, though he later apologized and said it was a joking taunt. The spelunker unsuccessfully sued Mr. Musk for defamation in a Los Angeles federal court.
In addition to his role helping manage Mr. Musk’s fortune, Mr. Birchall is also a director of his tunneling startup, Boring Co., and chief executive officer of Mr. Musk’s Neuralink, which aims to make a brain implant that could be used by quadriplegic patients to control a computer or other devices.
When Mr. Musk announced in 2020 he would move from California to Texas, Mr. Birchall moved his family there, too. He has since become the closest thing Mr. Musk has to a public face in the Texas capital, handling business and attending events on Mr. Musk’s behalf.
“No one else you reach out to who is close to Elon is going to return your calls,” says Tyson Tuttle, former chief executive of Austin semiconductor manufacturer Silicon Valley Labs.
‘Make big moves’
Mr. Kurganov first became friendly with Mr. Musk socially.
Born in Russia but raised in Germany from age 4 by parents who were engineers by trade, Mr. Kurganov grew up in a working class, immigrant household, according to an interview he gave to the Paul Phua Poker podcast.
In his 20s, he gained a level of fame as a professional poker player. Beginning around a decade ago, he began playing high-stakes tournaments in Las Vegas and racking up wins, fellow poker players say. He earned particular renown in 2012 when he won a €1,080,000 purse in Monte Carlo.
He was known as an aggressive player, and had the respect of his fellow pros, the players say. “Igor had a willingness to play a lot of hands and make big moves,” says one of them, Dan Smith.
Though he was spending much of his time in Las Vegas, his personality didn’t match the city’s loud stereotypes. One person who knows him says he was often drawn into long, philosophical conversations on topics such as the rise of artificial intelligence in poker. Mr. Kurganov was concerned that a computer program could be built that could beat even the most talented human player.
Ging Masinda, a Las Vegas marketer and acquaintance of Mr. Kurganov, says the flashiest thing about him is that he sometimes wears eyeliner. “There’s a kid in him,” she says.
In a 2015 interview on the Poker Life Podcast, he said he was developing an accounting app for poker players. He also co-founded the organization Raising for Effective Giving, designed to help poker players, as well as fantasy-sports players and finance professionals, find the right charities to which to donate their winnings, according to archived webpages.
REG was focused on effective altruism, an approach to giving that suggests that inherently subjective qualities such as relative charitable need can be quantified. It’s still a niche approach, because many charitable experts say it can encourage an impersonal, utilitarian approach to complicated moral issues.
Mr. Kurganov’s social life, the fellow poker players say, revolved around his longtime partner, fellow professional poker player Liv Boeree. Ms. Boeree has long been friends with the recording artist Grimes, who was first romantically linked to Mr. Musk in 2018. Around the same time, Mr. Musk made Ms. Boeree one of the handful of people he follows on Twitter.
“She was elated” about the follow, according to Joe Stapleton, a poker commentator who spoke to her about it.
The two couples began spending time together. Messrs. Musk and Kurganov bonded over a shared love of Burning Man, the free-spirited desert festival that both regularly attend. Ms. Boeree, meanwhile, stayed close with Grimes; the two women posted photos together on social media. Ms. Boeree didn’t respond to requests for comment, and Grimes, whose legal name is Claire Boucher, couldn’t be reached.
The introduction to Mr. Musk came as Mr. Kurganov was soon to retire from professional poker with millions in personal winnings. Yet his poker accounting app had never gotten off the ground, and REG remained small-fry in terms of the amount of money it directed.
REG said on its website that it directed $3.1 million in charitable giving in 2019, the most recent year mentioned, which the organization said “reflects all donations that have been significantly influenced by us.” The amount couldn’t be independently verified. REG didn’t respond to requests for comment.
When the pandemic hit, Messrs. Kurganov and Musk became closer. Mr. Kurganov laid out a vision in which he might be able to help Mr. Musk combine his interest in science and his vast fortune, for the greater good.
Mr. Musk, known to be open to new ideas, was intrigued by the prospect of an approach to giving that no other major donor had yet tried, according to people familiar with the matter. He gave Mr. Kurganov a job vetting grant requests from his foundation.
When Mr. Musk moved to Texas, Mr. Kurganov and Ms. Boeree soon followed.
‘Donation decisions’
By last August, two years after retiring from poker, Mr. Kurganov had an official email address at the Musk Foundation and was heavily involved in the charity. That month, he corresponded with Chris Carberry, CEO of the nonprofit Explore Mars Inc. The group was looking to raise $600,000 to spirit an Afghan girls robotics team out of the war-torn country.
Mr. Kurganov was skeptical about the cost. “Regarding the price breakdown, what I’m trying to find out is what the expenses will be specifically—I imagine there are additional costs to simply the flight costs, but am still surprised that the total cost scales linearly with the number of people,” he wrote in an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Carberry, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, was disappointed but not dissuaded. In another email, also reviewed by the Journal, he wrote to an associate “We have worked effectively with Igor in the recent past. Igor makes the day-to-day donation decisions.”
To Mr. Birchall, that was an untenable situation. He was legally head of the foundation, and as he saw it, Mr. Kurganov was a newcomer who suddenly had immense influence on what to do with Mr. Musk’s money, he told people.
Mr. Birchall also learned that a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent had begun making preliminary inquiries into Mr. Kurganov as part of his job to watch for foreign interference in U.S. companies, people familiar with the matter say. The FBI agent was concerned that a newcomer had so quickly been welcomed into Mr. Musk’s inner circle, the people say.
Mr. Kurganov hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing. An FBI spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Birchall, alarmed that Mr. Musk could be drawn into a federal investigation, this spring again pressed his internal case against Mr. Kurganov, people familiar with the matter say. It was inappropriate, in Mr. Birchall’s view, for Mr. Kurganov to have a central role in the $5.7 billion in shares that Mr. Musk had promised to donate.
During this period, Mr. Birchall was a constant presence at Mr. Musk’s side as his boss pursued Twitter. He helped line up billions of dollars in financing and spoke to shareholders and investors on Mr. Musk’s behalf about the future of the social-networking service.
By spring, the Tesla CEO’s bid for Twitter required him to put up tens of billions of dollars in personal funding and was consuming much of his attention. Meanwhile, Tesla’s stock was dropping as the broader market pulled back, pinching Mr. Musk’s net worth.
Mr. Birchall in May asked Mr. Musk to remove Mr. Kurganov from his post at the foundation.
Mr. Musk agreed to let Mr. Kurganov go, the representative of the foundation says.
None of Mr. Musk’s money was ultimately spent on projects related to effective altruism, the representative says, and Mr. Kurganov’s Musk Foundation email was switched off roughly six weeks ago.
—Elisa Cho and Rebecca Elliott contributed to this article.
Write to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Elon Musk gave 5 million Tesla shares to charity after teasing possible donation to fight world hunger
Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk donated more than 5 million Tesla shares in November, days after the U.N. World Food Program outlined a plan to potentially use a $6 billion donation from the world’s richest man.
A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission made public Monday showed the donation, but not the recipient. The Tesla
TSLA,
+1.83%
shares were transferred in batches between Nov. 19 and Nov. 29, as Musk was also selling Tesla stock in preparation for a large tax bill.
On Halloween, Musk promised on Twitter
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that he would sell Tesla stock and donate $6 billion to the U.N. World Food Program if it “can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger.” The executive director of the program, David Beasley, responded with a proposal on Monday, Nov. 15, and Musk began transferring shares to a charity the following Friday.
World Food Program spokesman Steve Taravella declined to disclose any information when contacted Monday. An email to Tesla, which disbanded its public-relations team in 2020, was not returned.
“To respect the privacy of our supporters, WFP’s practice has always been to leave any disclosure of possible contributions up to donors themselves,” Taravella wrote in an email to MarketWatch.
Musk did not respond publicly to the proposal from WFP’s Beasley, who had been tagging Musk in tweets that sought financial support from famous billionaires. Musk instead spent the day that Beasley posted it lashing out at U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders about taxes, after the Vermont independent and former Democratic presidential candidate tweeted: “We must demand that the extremely wealthy pay their fair share. Period.”
At the time, Musk was selling millions of shares in preparation for a large tax bill, while also exercising options for shares at much lower prices. Even with the gifted shares disclosed in Monday’s filing, Musk has about 2 million more shares — 172.6 million in total — than he owned when he began selling the stock.
Beasley has continued to tweet at Musk since the donation in apparent attempts to work together, including a Nov. 20 tweet asking him to “shock us all. Just do it.” He last tweeted at Musk on Dec. 16, according to a Twitter search.
It’s also possible the donation went to Musk’s own philanthropic organization, the Musk Foundation, which he established in 2002 and held a bit less than $1 billion as of the end of June 2020, according to a federal filing. Billionaires tend to divert stock to their own foundations before donating to charitable causes from those organizations.
For example, another electric-vehicle executive, Fisker Inc.
FSR,
+0.78%
Chief Executive and Chairman Henrik Fisker, directed $4 million in stock to establish a foundation in the name of him and his wife and $1.9 million to a donor-advised fund. That move was also made public Monday afternoon in an SEC filing, though that EV company also issued a news release outlining where the money was going.
Musk in 2012 signed the Giving Pledge, a public promise to give away at least half of his wealth in his lifetime or when he dies. Compared with some of his wealthy peers, he has been relatively quiet about his philanthropy until last year. Musk announced a $100 million prize aimed at helping to solve climate change, and he made several other donations in 2021, including a $1 million contribution to a Texas food bank, Vox reported. Musk sometimes announces his philanthropic activities on Twitter, including a September message about a $50 million donation for children’s cancer research.
At Monday’s closing price of $875.76, the 5,044,000 Tesla shares would be worth roughly $4.42 billion; on Nov. 19, when Musk began the transactions, the total outlay would have been worth roughly $5.74 billion at the closing price.
MarketWatch staff writer Leslie Albrecht contributed to this report.
Prince Andrew stripped of military titles and charities amid sex abuse lawsuit
Andrew will also no longer use the style “His Royal Highness” in any official capacity, a royal source told CNN on Thursday. The source said the decision was “widely discussed” among the royal family.
“With The Queen’s approval and agreement, the Duke of York’s military affiliations and Royal patronages have been returned to The Queen. The Duke of York will continue not to undertake any public duties and is defending this case as a private citizen,” the palace said in a statement.
The royal source also told CNN that “all of the Duke’s roles have been handed back to the Queen with immediate effect for redistribution to other members of the Royal Family. For clarity, they will not return to The Duke of York.”
On Wednesday, a New York judged ruled against a motion by Andrew’s legal team to dismiss a civil lawsuit brought against him by Virginia Giuffre, who alleges that she was trafficked by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and forced to perform sex acts with the prince at the age of 17. Andrew has vigorously denied those claims.
The allegations against Andrew — along with his relationship with the late convicted sex offender Epstein — had already tarnished the prince’s reputation. But the prospect of a public trial that would attract global attention could put Andrew — the third child (and reportedly the favorite son) of Queen Elizabeth II — in an unprecedented situation for a senior British royal.
Aside from the days following the death of his father, Prince Philip, in early 2021, he has rarely appeared in public since. He was even absent from publicly released photographs of his elder daughter Beatrice’s wedding in 2020.
The scandal has wider implications for the royal family, which was simultaneously forced to weather criticism over Andrew’s case and claims of racism from Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex over the past year. Buckingham Palace later described the claims as “concerning.”
The case against Andrew
Giuffre says she was trafficked by Epstein and forced to have sex with his friends — including the prince — at a time when she was underage (17) in the US. She said the assaults happened in London, New York and the US Virgin Islands; that Andrew was aware she was a minor at the time; and that she had been trafficked by Epstein.
She is seeking damages “in an amount to be determined at trial,” as well as attorneys’ fees and other further relief “as the Court may deem just and proper,” according to the lawsuit.
Andrew’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss late last year, but that effort failed on Wednesday and they must now prepare the prince to face a New York court. He could still try to negotiate a settlement with Giuffre to avoid the case going into a trial.
CNN’s Rob Picheta contributed to this report.
Haiti Kidnap Gang Seeks $17 Million Ransom for Abducted American Missionaries
Justice Minister
Liszt Quitel
said the FBI and Haitian police are in contact with the kidnappers and seeking the release of the missionaries, abducted last weekend just outside the capital Port-au-Prince by a gang called 400 Mawozo.
Among the missionaries are five children, Mr. Quitel said, one an 8-month baby and the others 3, 6, 14 and 15 years old.
President Biden has been briefed, White House press secretary
Jen Psaki
said Monday, and the FBI will help Haitian officials investigate the kidnapping and try to negotiate a release.
“The FBI is part of a coordinated U.S. government effort to get the U.S. citizens involved to safety,” she said.
Mr. Quitel said negotiations could take weeks.
“We are trying to get them released without paying any ransom,” said Mr. Quitel. “This is the first course of action. Let’s be honest: When we give them that money, that money is going to be used for more guns and more munitions.”
He said Haiti’s authorities are seeking an outcome similar to what followed the abduction in early April of a group of Catholic priests and nuns by the same gang. The five priests, two nuns and three of their relatives were released at the end of the month. Ransom was paid for just two of the priests, Mr. Quitel said.
“That would be the best outcome,” he said.
Mr. Quitel said the missionaries, members of Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, are held in a safe house right outside Croix-des-Bouquets, the suburb of Port-au-Prince controlled by 400 Mawazo and near where they were kidnapped by heavily armed men around midday on Saturday.
Kidnappings in the impoverished country, including targeting foreigners, have jumped in recent months amid the political chaos after the July assassination of President
Jovenel Moïse.
Gangs control an increasing swath of the chronically unstable country.
Port-au-Prince came to a standstill on Monday after a national transportation union launched a strike supported by everyone from bank employees to human-rights organizations to protest the surge of kidnappings and lack of security.
Haitians in the city said schools, banks, restaurants and supermarkets were closed and nearby roads blocked by union members and ordinary citizens angry at the violence.
Changeux Mehu, the leader of the transportation union, said the strike could continue on Tuesday to pressure Prime Minister
Ariel Henry’s
government to improve security.
“If the prime minister can’t fulfill our demands, we will call on him to resign,” said Mr. Mehu. “We want the end of insecurity and the end of the kidnappings.”
The gang, 400 Mawozo, has increasingly turned to kidnapping for ransom in recent months, according to Haitian officials. Earlier this year, it kidnapped five priests and two nuns, including French nationals, who were held for three weeks before being released. It is unknown if ransom was paid.
Mawozo means “from the countryside” in Haitian Creole, reflecting the gang’s roots in the eastern district of Croix-des-Bouquets, where they began their activities by stealing cattle before moving into car theft and, more recently, kidnappings for ransom, according to Gédéon Jean of the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights, a Port-au-Prince-based organization that tracks kidnappings in Haiti.
The Christian charity, which was founded by members of the Amish and Mennonite sects, said in a statement on Monday that Haitian and U.S. officials were aware of the situation and working to resolve it. “We continue to monitor the situation closely and are in earnest prayer,” it said.
At the group’s headquarters in Berlin, Ohio, in a picturesque region of farms and Amish shops catering to tourists, the doors to the lobby were locked Monday and a sign said that it was closed as a result of the kidnapping and asking for prayers.
Wanda Cross, a 24-year-old Mennonite who lives near Minerva, Ohio, delivered donated clothes to the Christian Aid Ministries’ headquarters Monday.
Ms. Cross, who was born in Haiti and adopted by a Mennonite family in the U.S., said she was shocked to learn of the kidnappings, and that she knew one couple from Oregon.
“It’s very, very sad,” she said. “It makes me want to just go there and talk to these gangs.”
Ms. Cross said she visited her home country in April during what she described as a lull in the unrest there to see her birth mother and to visit a school. Two days after she returned to the U.S. in April, she said she learned of kidnappings at the time in the same areas in Haiti that she had visited.
Although Christian Aid Ministries is based in Berlin, most of the people on board the bus were from other Mennonite communities around the country, according to leaders in the local Amish and Mennonite community. One is believed to be from southern Ontario, Canada, which has a large Mennonite community.
All of the kidnap victims are Mennonites and not Amish, said Marcus Yoder, executive director of the Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin.
Both Mennonites and Amish hold many beliefs in common, such as adult baptism, simplicity and following the teachings of Jesus, but the Mennonites drive cars and have electricity in their homes, unlike the Amish, who typically don’t.
Christian Aid Ministries was started in 1981 as an informal charity, shipping Christmas bundles and other items to Christians in Eastern Europe, and later created a formal organization called Christian Aid to Romania, focused on sending items to Romanian orphanages, according to Steve Nolt, senior scholar and professor of history at the Young Center at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa.
In early 1988, Christian Aid to Romania started sending donations to Nicaragua and Haiti, building on Amish-Mennonite mission contacts in those two countries, he said, and later to Liberia. The organization’s name then changed from Christian Aid to Romania to Christian Aid Ministries.
Haiti is one of about a dozen countries where Christian Aid Ministries has expatriate staff on the ground year round with local partners, said Dr. Nolt. He said there are several Mennonite organizations doing work in Haiti, but they tend to work independently, coordinating with local officials, rather than other Mennonite organizations.
—Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington, D.C., contributed to this article.
Write to Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com, Juan Montes at juan.montes@wsj.com and Clare Ansberry at clare.ansberry@wsj.com
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Lil Nas X’s ‘Montero’ Raises Thousands for Charities Through ‘Baby Registry’
Lil Nas X racked up millions of streams — as expected — but, more importantly, he also raised tens of thousands of dollars for various charities with the drop of his debut album.
The long-anticipated “Montero” was released Friday, but hype for the project started weeks before when Nas X announced the album’s tracklist. However, in announcing the songs, he also tied a charity important to him to each track.
me and my team have set up a “baby registry” for many charities if you guys would like to donate.
🦋💕https://t.co/mS7fvRsExo pic.twitter.com/7asfGJ2udG— MONTERO 🦋 (@LilNasX) September 7, 2021
@LilNasX
A rep for Bros in Convo — a charity out of Florida that helps Black, gay, bisexual and queer men — tells us as of Friday night, it’s received $33,140 in donations thanks to the album. The charity was tied to the song “That’s What I Want.”
Transinclusive Group — a national charity that provides assistance to transgender/non-conforming people — tells us they’ve gotten $5,000 thanks to promotion through the single “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).”
Organizations CH-PIER and Compassionate Atlanta, groups that work to help members of the LGBTQ community, creating safe spaces and educating the public on issues like HIV tell us they’ve received close to $1,000 total from the album fundraising.
CH-PIER and Compassionate Atlanta were promoted through the singles “Dead Right Now” and “The Art of Realization”, respectfully.
“Montero” got a ton of praise upon its release, and it’s really incredible to see the causes it’s helped as well.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, Ex-Wife of Jeff Bezos, Marries Seattle School Teacher
MacKenzie Scott, the philanthropist formerly married to
Jeff Bezos,
has married again following her 2019 divorce from the
Amazon.com Inc.
founder, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Ms. Scott, one of the world’s wealthiest women, has married Dan Jewett, a science teacher at a Seattle private school, according to the person.
Ms. Scott has devoted much of her time recently to philanthropic efforts benefiting women-led charities, food banks and Black colleges, among other institutions. Since her divorce, Ms. Scott has given away more than $4 billion of her fortune, according to a post she wrote on Medium in December.
In a post dated Saturday on Ms. Scott’s page on the Giving Pledge website, for billionaires who have promised to donate most of their fortune to philanthropic efforts, Mr. Jewett signed on to her commitment.
“It is strange to be writing a letter indicating I plan to give away the majority of my wealth during my lifetime, as I have never sought to gather the kind of wealth required to feel like saying such a thing would have particular meaning,” Mr. Jewett’s post says.
“Dan is such a great guy, and I am happy and excited for the both of them,” said Mr. Bezos in a statement provided by an Amazon spokesman.
Ms. Scott and Mr. Jewett couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.
Ms. Scott and Mr. Bezos, both Princeton University graduates, met while working at a hedge fund in New York. She helped him start Amazon in 1994, and is the author of two novels. Her Amazon author page now says that she “lives in Seattle with her four children and her husband, Dan.”
At the time of their 2019 divorce, after 25 years of marriage, Mr. Bezos was the wealthiest person in the world, with his stake of more than 16% of Amazon. Ms. Scott received 4% of Amazon’s shares as part of their divorce settlement, though Mr. Bezos kept voting rights for those shares.
Ms. Scott joined the Giving Pledge in May 2019, shortly after terms of her divorce with Mr. Bezos were finalized. The pledge was started by Bill and
Melinda Gates
and
Warren Buffett
in 2010. Mr. Bezos hasn’t joined the pledge.
Amazon’s business has been a major beneficiary of the pandemic, driving up its stock price. Mr. Bezos, after jostling for a time with
Elon Musk
for the title, again ranks as the world’s richest person, with a net worth of around $177 billion, according to wealth rankings by Forbes and Bloomberg. Ms. Scott ranks the 22nd richest person, at around $53 billion.
Mr. Jewett is a teacher at Lakeside School, according to the school’s website.
“In a stroke of happy coincidence, I am married to one of the most generous and kind people I know—and joining her in a commitment to pass on an enormous financial wealth to serve others,” Mr. Jewett said in his Giving Pledge letter.
Write to Dana Mattioli at dana.mattioli@wsj.com
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