MACKENZIE SCOTT

MacKenzie Scott studied English at Princeton, where Toni Morrison taught her. She married Jeff Bezos in 1993 and was one of Amazon's first employees, helping build the company in its earliest days.

She is also a novelist. The Testing of Luther Albright (2005) won an American Book Award, and Traps followed in 2013.

After the divorce in 2019, she received a 4% stake in Amazon worth about $38 billion at the time and signed the Giving Pledge. What happened next shocked the philanthropy world.

She gave $5.8 billion in 2020 alone, kept going every year after, and then gave $7.1 billion in 2025, bringing her total since 2019 to about $26.3 billion. Her approach is radically different from traditional billionaire philanthropy.

She gives unrestricted gifts, trusts organizations to know what they need, and deliberately targets groups often overlooked by major foundations.

Amazon (early employee, worked on the original business plan and early accounting). Author of two novels.

Giving Pledge signatory (2019). Yield Giving (the website where she reports her gifts and, since 2023, runs open calls for nonprofits).

Scott is not a traditional investor. She is primarily a philanthropist.

Most of her fortune came as Amazon stock, and she has sold large amounts of it over the years to fund her giving. Her "investment" thesis is philanthropic: large, unrestricted gifts to organizations working on education, economic mobility, racial and gender equity, health and local community needs.

She does not sit on their boards, does not demand reports and does not seek naming rights.

Redefining philanthropy. Scott showed that a billionaire can give away more than $26 billion in about six years without a giant foundation, without naming buildings after herself, and without the usual strings.

Her gifts to historically Black colleges, community colleges and small local nonprofits were often the largest those groups had ever received. Her approach has challenged every other billionaire philanthropist.

Critics argue that Scott's rapid, unrestricted giving lacks accountability — some organizations reportedly struggled to absorb sudden multimillion-dollar gifts without the infrastructure to manage them effectively. The hands-off approach, while refreshing, has raised questions about whether all donations are creating maximum impact.

Trust the people closest to the problem. Scott believes that the organizations doing the work on the ground — food banks, community colleges, racial justice nonprofits — know better than any billionaire where money should go.

Her role is to write the check, not to direct the strategy.

Married Jeff Bezos in 1993 and divorced him in 2019. Married Dan Jewett, a Seattle science teacher, in 2021, and they divorced in 2023.

Four children: three sons and a daughter adopted from China. Lives in Seattle.

Extremely private.

Princeton University, BA in English (1992). Toni Morrison was one of her teachers and later called her one of the best students she ever had.

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