Over the past year, Lauren Sanchez Bezos has become a major player in determining which organizations and causes receive donations from Jeff Bezos’s $10 billion climate change fund.
According to Fortune, Sanchez Bezos has served as vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund since early 2020, when she was the Amazon multi-billionaire’s girlfriend.
The fund, the largest contribution any individual has ever made to the environment, is committed to deploying the full $10 billion by the end of the decade, according to Northeastern University. According to the fund’s website, so far it has cut checks for 335 grants, totaling $2.4 billion.
Since Sanchez Bezos married her husband in a star-studded affair in Venice last year, she has become the fund’s more public-facing leader, frequently announcing new donations.
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Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez attend the 2022 Robin Hood Benefit at the Jacob Javits Center on May 9, 2022 in New York City. (Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Robin Hood/Getty Images)
In September 2025, he said the fund had distributed $37.5 million in grants to protect 835,000 square miles of waters surrounding a dozen countries in the Pacific Ocean. The initial amount was part of the fund’s $100 million commitment to what it called “one of the boldest ocean conservation efforts ever.”
“The Pacific is not just a beautiful backdrop, it is a lifeline,” Sanchez Bezos said in a statement at the time. “Pacific Island nations and territories are setting the pace. We are here to match that ambition and help translate it into security at scale.”
In October, they announced a $30 million prize to 15 teams that win the fund’s “AI for Climate and Nature Grand Challenge”. Each team received $2 million to begin using artificial intelligence to solve problems like biodiversity loss and food insecurity.
“AI can be a powerful ally in helping make the world a better place,” Sanchez Bezos said. “These innovators, using AI, are showing us new possibilities by reimagining how we grow food, protect wildlife and power our planet to make a real impact.”
In addition to environmental causes, Sanchez Bezos said in December that she and her husband had pledged $102.5 million to organizations fighting homelessness across the United States. That money comes from Bezos’ Day One Families Fund, which has donated more than $850 million so far to organizations in all 50 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico and Guam.
Lauren Sanchez boards a taxi boat at the Aman Hotel in Venice on June 26, 2026. She and Bezos had a three-day wedding party which was attended by many celebrities. (Stefano Relandini/AFP via Getty Images/Getty Images)
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The Day One Families Fund is part of a total of $2 billion that Bezos and his wife plan to donate to nonprofits that help homeless families obtain stable housing. There are also initiatives to create and operate tuition-free pre-schools in areas of the country where education options are lacking.
The couple also presented Neurodiversity Alliance founder David Flink with the Bezos Courage and Civility Award, a $5 million grant.
The New York-based nonprofit provides mentors to students with learning disabilities. Sánchez Bezos has said that she unknowingly suffered from dyslexia and struggled in school for years, later discovering the condition when she was in college.
Despite Bezos’ philanthropy, he has not donated as much of his net worth as others who have similar levels of wealth. The most important thing is that this pair is far behind Bezos’s ex-wife Mackenzie Scott.
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MacKenzie Scott has donated a far greater portion of her wealth to charity than her ex-husband Jeff Bezos. Till now she has donated 26.4 billion dollars. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
According to Forbes, Scott has donated $26.4 billion over a seven-year period, which is 46% of his estimated net worth of $35.4 billion. In 2025 alone, she was the most charitable person on earth with donations of $7.2 billion.
Over his lifetime, Bezos has donated $4.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is less than 2% of his $266 billion net worth.
Bezos has also not signed the Giving Pledge, an initiative launched in 2010 by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates that urges billionaires to donate the majority of their wealth over their lifetime.
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Scott has signed the pledge, but Bezos has not. He told CNN in 2022 that he intends to donate most of his money to charity, but said it is difficult to do so efficiently.
“It’s not easy. Building Amazon was not easy. It took a lot of hard work, a group of very smart teammates, hard-working teammates, and I’m finding — and I think Lauren is finding the same thing — that charity, philanthropy, is very similar,” he said in the CNN interview.
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