Jack Dorsey announced a billion-dollar donation to fight the Coronavirus.
The co-founder and CEO of Twitter has announced with a tweet that he will transfer ownership of 19,833,400 shares of Square, worth about 1 billion, to StartSmall LLC to finance the fight against COVID-19. This is about 28% of his total assets.
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
“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:”.
He also linked a Google spreadsheet with the tracking data of this donation.
Dorsey is also the co-founder and CEO of Square, a company that deals with online payments, and which is involved in the crypto industry with the Square Crypto project.
Square Inc. currently has a market capitalization of approximately $29 billion, so the donation will cover about 3.5% of the entire market cap.
This is one of the largest donations made in the world by a single person to fight the Covid-19 Coronavirus, and Dorsey further explains the matter in some other tweets.
Dorsey wrote that, in this respect, the situation is increasingly urgent, and he wants to see the impact of donations throughout his life, in the hope that this gesture will push other people to do something similar.
The reason why he chose the shares of Square and not Twitter would lie in the fact that Dorsey owns so much more of them.
The founder of Twitter also explained the choice of StartSmall Foundation, making it possible for the grants to be disbursed directly to the recipient organizations, and all transfers, sales and grants will be made public in the Google tracking spreadsheet.
Dorsey motivated the choice of UBI, and girl’s health and education, saying he believes they represent the best long-term solutions to the problems the world faces.
