Nobody should have an issue with donating money to a worthwhile cause following a natural disaster that’s affected a massive amount of people, but the way in which Dwayne Johnson and Oprah Winfrey have gone about it has left a bad taste in an awful lot of mouths.
The Rock has proven himself to be one of the most generous and kind-hearted people in Hollywood countless times over, while Oprah is hardly a stranger to forking out to lend an assist to those in need. And yet, the ridiculously wealthy duo have been coming under constant fire for asking the public to send in their financial contributions, which is a lot easier than it sounds given the current socioeconomic climate.
Sure, they’ve tossed in $5 million of their own money apiece, but when you break it down, it’s barely more than a drop in the ocean. Johnson is estimated to have a net worth as high as $800 million, with Oprah almost five times richer based on reports of her own personal pot of gold being as much as $3.5 billion. That means their whip-round amounts to just 0.23 percent of their cumulative finances, which is why the optics haven’t been treated as particularly enamoring.
There’s so many people out there who’d love to help but can’t even scrape together enough to cover their own rent and bills, meaning that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why a pair of inordinately financially-endowed stars mounting social media campaigns to convince Joe Public to dip into their barren bank accounts hasn’t generated the required outpouring of enthusiasm.