MacKenzie Scott – A New Voice Among Major Philanthropists
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott’s donations are among the largest ever recorded from a single individual in the world of charitable giving. In the final four months of 2020 alone, she contributed more than $4 billion to charitable causes, with her focus specifically on the needs of people affected by the coronavirus pandemic. Her total giving for the year amounts to about $6 billion.
Since her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Scott has come fully into her own as a philanthropist who means business. Discussing this commitment, she has made note of the fact that COVID-19 has disproportionately affected the lives of women, people of color, and other historically marginalized groups, in terms of both health and economic outcomes. Her concerns are well founded. According to estimates from experts at Columbia University and other institutions, some 6 to 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty during the pandemic.
Keeping it local, personal, and real
Scott’s donations in 2020 were also notable because all were unrestricted. They came with no strings attached—no specifications about how the funds should be used. Instead, she and her team of advisors have trusted the receiving organizations to know how best to use the money.
Her gifts have benefited some 384 different organizations located in all 50 states, as well as in Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. Some of these organizations provide core pandemic-related needs such as food and short-term emergency economic relief, while others are involved in long-term projects that address financial services, jobs training, education, and debt relief for marginalized people.
Still other grant recipients include legal defense groups and civil rights advocacy organizations dedicated to dismantling systemic discrimination. The YMCA of the USA and its local associations, which have experienced especially hard times weathering the pandemic, have received multiple gifts from Scott. Other causes that have benefited from her generosity include Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and LGBTQ rights organizations.
Instead of the usual marquee-name targets of philanthropy—think Harvard or Yale University —Scott has given multi-million-dollar gifts to many local and regional community colleges and state universities. For example, she gave a $50 million surprise gift to Prairie View A&M University, a historically African American school in Texas. Scott’s gift is the largest in the school’s history.
Scott has consistently focused on organizations whose leaders exemplify their organizational missions. Additionally, she and her team of advisors have concentrated on moving funds quickly to meet urgent needs, seeking out organizations that are data-driven and that have demonstrated their potential for high impact.
Always part of the journey
Scott grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Princeton University. (Scott is her grandfather’s name; she now uses it after having dropped “Bezos” post-divorce.) She and Bezos met in the early 1990s when she applied for a research assistant position with hedge fund company DE Shaw in New York. Bezos was her interviewer. They married in 1993.
Scott worked with Bezos to build Amazon from the beginning, even serving as the fledgling company’s first accountant. Its first place of business was their Seattle garage, and she helped come up with the name “Amazon” after an early try at a name, “Cadabra,” sounded unfortunately too close to the word “cadaver.”
Her previous independent accomplishments are also notable. In Princeton’s creative writing program, she studied with Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who later called Scott one of her best students. Although preferring to maintain a low profile, Scott achieved success as a novelist, with her debut, The Testing of Luther Albright (2005), finding critical favor. It took Scott a decade to write the book. These busy years also saw her relocating cross-country to help her husband start his business, even as she shouldered a large part of the responsibility of raising their four children.
A lifetime commitment
Part of Scott’s divorce settlement was a 4 percent interest in Amazon, then valued at $38 million.
By the reckoning of Forbes magazine in January 2021, she was the world’s fourth-wealthiest woman, with an estimated net worth of more than $56 billion, even after her extensive charitable donations. Time magazine placed her on its list of the 100 Most Influential People of 2020.
In 2019, she signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment that asks the world’s wealthiest people to commit to giving away the bulk of their fortunes to charitable causes. Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, among other well-known billionaires, have taken the pledge.
Scott has written that she has no doubt that anyone’s personal fortune is to a large extent the result of collective efforts and pre-existing favorable—and often inequitable—social structures.
She is dedicated to giving most of her money back to “the society that helped generate it,” and to continue giving “until the safe is empty” in a project she anticipates will take years.
Giving back on this scale has given Scott a new sense of optimism for the future. “Our hopes,” she wrote in a blog post celebrating people volunteering in their communities, “are fed by others.”