Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey on Tuesday pledged $1 billion to the global fight against COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Dorsey said he would be taking $1 billion in equity out of Square to help fund “global COVID-19 relief”. He said the amount represents about 28% of his net worth.
“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,” Dorsey tweeted.
The funds will be distributed through his new Start Small LLC and will be tracked on a Google Doc he shared alongside his announcement.
“After we disarm this pandemic, the focus will shift to girl’s health and education, and UBI,” he tweeted, referring to universal basic income.
He is the latest tech exec to pledge money to fight COVID-19.
Last week, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos donated $100 million to U.S. food banks to help feed Americans who have been forced to stay home and now unemployed. Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, along with his wife Priscilla Chan, donated $25 million to finding a coronavirus treatment. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he will be spending billions of dollars to create factories for developing a vaccine.”
COVID-19 has killed more than 80, 000 people globally and over 12,000 in the United States alone, according to the latest data by Johns Hopkins University. In New York, more than 5,000 people have died.
The number of confirmed cases has already skyrocketed above 1.4 million. Of that number close to 300,000 have already recovered.
Simon Ateba is Chief White House Correspondent for Today News Africa. Simon covers President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, the U.S. government, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other financial and international institutions in Washington D.C. and New York City.