Amazon boss Jeff Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, one of the biggest names in philanthropy, set a new record of donations earlier this year by gifting over $1 million to Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Fortune reported this week that Scott's $42 million donations to Elizabeth City State University on the school’s Founders Day in North Carolina pushed her total giving to HBCUs well past the $1 billion mark.
And that’s just part of the billionaire philanthropist’s $26 billion philanthropic commitment since 2020, in which she’s donated to thousands of organisations focused on DEI, disaster recovery, community development, health, and environmental causes.
Scott is worth an estimated $37 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Meanwhile, Forbes puts her "real-time net worth" at $32.5 billion.
MacKenzie Scott's total charitable donations through Yield Giving have surpassed $26.3 billion given to non-profit organizations.
Her fortune primarily comes from a 4 per cent stake in Amazon, one of the biggest online retailers, which she received during her divorce from founder Jeff Bezos in 2019. The 4 per cent stake in Amazon was worth $36 billion.
Since then, she’s reduced her stake by about 42 percent, selling or donating about 58 million shares, worth around $12.6 billion as of late 2025, Fortune reported.
After gaining 400 million Amazon shares following her 2019 divorce from Bezos, Scott now slashed her stake in the $2 trillion tech giant by nearly half.
A regulatory filing with the SEC dated September 30, 2025, showed that Scott held 81.1 million shares — down 58 million from a year earlier, as Bloomberg reported.
In May 2019, shortly after she announced the terms of the divorce on X (formerly Twitter), she signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away at least half of her wealth over the course of her lifetime.
On a website called Yield Giving, Scott shares details of the $19.3 billion she has given to more than 2,500 nonprofits.
According to Forbes, she 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.
MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, accounted for roughly one-third of all major US 'megagift' charitable donations last year, according to a report in June 2026.
Of the $19.2 billion worth of megagifts made by donors in 2025, Scott’s giving represented one-third, according to data provided to Fortune from Giving USA and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Her contributions totalled nearly $7 billion in a single year, bringing her overall giving through her philanthropy initiative, Yield Giving, to more than $26.3 billion across thousands of non-profits.
