How MacKenzie Scott Gave Away Virtually $6 Billion Closing Year—And Ended Up Richer

The ragged accomplice of Jeff Bezos is working on making a giftmost of her fortune. Nonetheless rising Amazon inventory blueprint she has tons of more to provide away.

MacKenzie Scott first landed on Forbes’ checklist of the World’s Billionaires a 365 days ago, with a $36 billion fortune made up of shares in Amazon that she received in her mid-2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos. She used to be the 22nd-richest particular person on this planet and the fourth-richest girl on the checklist.

Now, as Forbes releases our 2021 checklist of the enviornment’s wealthiest, Scott, at 50 years prone, is quiet ranked No. 22. Nonetheless she’s worth $53 billion—practically 50% larger than a 365 days ago, as a results of a practically 66% lengthen in the worth of Amazon inventory. And that’s after she achieve a fresh bar for philanthropic giving in 2020 by with out notice distributing $5.8 billion in donations to nonprofit groups. Her fatter fortune makes her the third-richest girl on this planet, in the lend a hand of L’Oréal heir Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, who’s worth $73.6 billion, and Walmart heir Alice Walton, worth $61.8 billion.

To construct Scott’s 2020 charitable giving in context: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the best deepest basis in the U.S. with a $49.8 billion endowment and 1,602 staff, made $5.1 billion in grants in 2019. Scott’s philanthropic effort doesn’t have its have net page, and it’s now not clear what number of folk she’s employed to analyze organizations and distribute grants. She is working with nonprofit agency Bridgespan, which advises nonprofits and philanthropists.

Scott—who announced she’d modified her final title from Bezos to her heart title in July—hasn’t given an interview since she and Jeff Bezos divorced. Nonetheless in Would possibly merely 2019 she did signal the Giving Pledge, a promise to provide away as a minimal half of her fortune to charitable causes all over her existence or after she dies. 

In her Giving Pledge letter, she wrote, “My approach to philanthropy will proceed to be thoughtful. This can steal time and energy and care. Nonetheless I received’t wait. And I’ll protect at it till the valid is empty.” Her finest venture can also very successfully be the continuing effort to empty the valid when the money inner it keeps multiplying. (In March this 365 days, a fresh Giving Pledge letter seemed on the pledge’s net page from Scott’s fresh husband, Dan Jewett, a trainer at the deepest school in Seattle that her youth have attended.)

Scott’s donations have helped 500 organizations all over the U.S., including Puerto Rico, from historically Sunless faculties and universities to the nationwide food bank nonprofit Feeding America. “This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of American citizens already struggling,” she wrote on Medium in December as allotment of her announcement that she gave practically $4.2 billion to 384 organizations over four months: “Financial losses and successfully being outcomes alike have been worse for girls, for individuals of color and for individuals residing in poverty. In the meantime, [the pandemic] has seriously elevated the wealth of billionaires.” 

Scott wrote that after her first major giving drive in July 2020, she asked her advisors to trek up her philanthropy to lend a hand individuals affected by the pandemic. She desired to provide “particular consideration to these working in communities facing excessive projected food insecurity, excessive measures of racial difference, excessive native poverty rates and low fetch admission to to philanthropic capital.” 

Philanthropy is now not Scott’s sole ardour. At age 6, she wrote her first book, The Book Worm, a 142-page original. She graduated from excessive school a 365 days early and studied at Princeton, the build she majored in English. Her thesis book used to be Nobel Prize-profitable novelist Toni Morrison. Upon graduation, she joined the hedge fund D.E. Shaw and started dating Jeff Bezos. They each and every stop the agency to transfer to Seattle and starting up Amazon.com in 1994. An early worker told Forbes in 2019 that Scott “did with regards to every thing” to lend a hand fetch Amazon off the ground. Crop Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon, concurred. “MacKenzie used to be an equal accomplice to Jeff in the early days,” he told Forbes in 2019. 

Scott went lend a hand to her writing, on the other hand, and printed her first original, The Attempting out of Luther Albright, in 2005. Eight years later, she printed but every other original, Traps. The reclusive billionaire didn’t acknowledge to Forbes’ request for an interview. 

She wrote in her December put up on Medium that she’d been studying a form of poems by Emily Dickinson: “Because the iciness of 2020 approached, I will also want expected one in all [Dickinson’s poems on death] to protect up floating to solutions, but as an change it used to be her writing on hope: ‘Hope is the ingredient with feathers,’ it begins, ‘/ That perches in the soul / And sings the tune with out the words / And never stops—in any respect-’.”