Scott promised in her May 2019 letter on the Giving Pledge to “keep at it until the safe is empty”. Bloomberg has estimated her net worth as high as $US62 billion ($95.53b), but between her billions of dollars in contributions and the decline in the stock market, the news organisation now gauges her fortune at $US27.8 billion ($42.83b).
In his own Giving Pledge letter two years later, Jewett sounded full of enthusiasm. “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,” he wrote.
Yet he also noted that he had not previously considered making any kind of public statement about his charitable priorities because he had “never sought to gather the kind of wealth required to feel like saying such a thing would have particular meaning.”
As recently as last week, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which preserves old versions of webpages, his letter was still twinned with hers on the site, accompanied by a photo of the two of them looking as if they were out for a hike together. Today there is just a headshot of Scott, along with her letter.
Scott has refused to speak publicly about her giving, declining repeated interview requests from news organisations including The New York Times. Her lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. Attempts to reach Jewett through friends, family and former colleagues and at an address associated with him in Seattle were unsuccessful. His lawyer declined, through a legal assistant, to comment on the divorce.
Scott made her charitable announcements in long posts on Medium that listed the names of organisations that received billions of dollars cumulatively.
Last month, Scott gave two homes in Beverly Hills, California, valued at a combined $US55 million ($84.74b), to the California Community Foundation. The foundation’s affordable housing grant-making functions will receive 90 per cent of the value of the properties. Jewett’s name, which had been in recent gift announcements, was nowhere in the news release.
The Health Forward Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, announced on Tuesday that it had received a $US15 million ($23.1b) gift from Scott. The Episcopal Health Foundation in Houston also recently announced that it had received a $US20 million ($30.8m) grant from Scott. Neither announcement mentioned Jewett.
Jewett taught at the Lakeside School, the prestigious Seattle private school attended by the Bezos children, where he was popular among students and fellow teachers alike.
“He’s earnest, not very edgy,” said Angela Loihl, who met Jewett through a mutual friend. Loihl, who spent weeks in 2014 with Jewett driving in a small-motored car from London to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, recalled how that mutual friend had told her years later, after he married Scott, “He’s the perfect person to end up with this money to give away — no sense of greed at all.”
According to the divorce filing, the couple married in California in 2021. The news of their marriage took even Jewett’s friends and colleagues by surprise — producing a whirlwind of news coverage far beyond his expectations, as reporters even appeared on the Lakeside campus. Although he finished the term there, Jewett felt his presence on campus was a distraction.
His new wife had become arguably the most influential philanthropist in the world with an approach that emphasised huge grants — often the largest single gift a group had received — with no strings attached.
In his Giving Pledge letter published in March 2021, Jewett wrote that he was “grateful for the exceptional privilege it will be to partner in giving away assets with the potential to do so much good when shared.”
In June 2021, Scott posted about her giving on Medium, where she wrote: “Me, Dan, a constellation of researchers and administrators and advisers — we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change.” Sometime in the past week, searches on the Internet Archive showed, the post was edited, and Jewett’s name was removed from there as well.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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