MacKenzie Scott

MacKenzie Scott is a philanthropist, author and the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to whom she was married for 25 years. They divorced in mid 2019 and she received 25% of his Amazon stake. In May 2019, shortly after she announced the terms of the divorce on Twitter, she signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away at least half of her wealth over the course of her lifetime. In 2020 she announced just over $5.8 billion in gifts to some 500 nonprofits; in June 2021, Scott said she gave another $2.74 billion to 286 groups. Scott employs a “no strings attached” style of giving, wherein the nonprofits to which she donates have full control over how to best deploy the new funds. Scott, who has published two novels, was a student of author Toni Morrison at Princeton and worked as a research assistant for her.