MacKenzie Scott

MacKenzie Scott
Born	MacKenzie Scott Tuttle 7 4, 1970
Birthplace	San Francisco, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Novelist, philanthropist
Known for	Philanthropy, early contribution to Amazon, The Testing of Luther Albright
Education	Princeton University (BA)
Children	4
Awards	American Book Award (2006)

MacKenzie Scott (née Tuttle, formerly Bezos; born April 7, 1970) is an American novelist and philanthropist who has emerged as one of the most consequential charitable donors in modern history. A graduate of Princeton University, Scott played an early role in the founding of Amazon.com alongside her then-husband Jeff Bezos, whom she married in 1993 and divorced in 2019. Following the dissolution of that marriage, Scott retained a significant stake in Amazon, making her one of the wealthiest individuals in the world. Rather than accumulating further wealth, she embarked on a sustained and unprecedented campaign of charitable giving, distributing billions of dollars to organizations focused on education, racial equity, gender equity, public health, and economic mobility. As of December 2025, Scott had donated a total of approximately $26.3 billion to more than 1,600 charitable organizations. Her literary career includes the novel The Testing of Luther Albright (2005), which won the American Book Award in 2006, and Traps (2013). She is also the founder and executive director of Bystander Revolution, an anti-bullying organization established in 2014. Scott was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2020 and was listed among the world's 100 most powerful women by Forbes in 2021, 2023, and 2025.

Early Life

MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was born on April 7, 1970, in San Francisco, California. She grew up in the San Francisco area, where she developed an early interest in writing and literature. Details about her parents and childhood remain largely private, consistent with Scott's broader preference for maintaining a low public profile throughout much of her life.

Scott's formative years coincided with the early stages of the personal computing revolution in the San Francisco Bay Area. While specific details of her pre-collegiate life are not extensively documented in public sources, her later academic achievements at Princeton University and her early career choices indicate a serious commitment to the literary arts from a young age.

Education

Scott attended Princeton University, where she studied under the novelist Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize–winning author who taught in Princeton's creative writing program. Morrison would later describe Scott as one of the best students she had ever taught in her creative writing classes. Scott graduated from Princeton with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Her time at Princeton proved formative in two significant ways: it deepened her ambitions as a fiction writer, and it was during her time in the broader Princeton and New York professional world that she would meet her future husband, Jeff Bezos.

Career

Early Career and Amazon

After graduating from Princeton, Scott worked in New York City, where she met Jeff Bezos at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw. The two began dating and married in 1993. In 1994, the couple relocated from New York to Seattle so that Bezos could launch Amazon.com, his online bookselling venture. Scott was involved in the company's earliest days, contributing to its establishment during the critical startup phase. She was one of the first employees and helped with various aspects of the fledgling company during the period when Amazon operated out of the couple's garage.

As Amazon grew from a small online bookstore into one of the world's largest and most valuable companies, Scott's role shifted away from the day-to-day operations of the business. She focused increasingly on her writing career and on raising the couple's four children. Nevertheless, her early contributions to Amazon and her long tenure as the spouse of its founder meant that she held a substantial ownership stake in the company, which would later become the foundation of her considerable personal wealth.

Literary Career

Scott pursued fiction writing alongside her role in the Bezos household, working on her debut novel over the course of nearly a decade. The Testing of Luther Albright was published in 2005. The novel tells the story of a father in Sacramento, California, whose carefully constructed life begins to unravel, exploring themes of family, perception, and the fragility of control. The book received favorable reviews and attracted attention both for its literary merits and for the profile of its author.

In 2006, The Testing of Luther Albright won the American Book Award, a prize administered by the Before Columbus Foundation that recognizes outstanding literary achievement from the full range of the nation's diverse literary community. The award established Scott as a serious literary voice independent of her association with Amazon and Jeff Bezos.

Scott's second novel, Traps, was published in 2013. The novel continued to demonstrate her interest in complex character studies and domestic tension. While Traps received less public attention than her debut, it confirmed her ongoing commitment to the craft of fiction writing.

In a 2018 essay, Scott addressed broader questions about creativity and the mythology of the lone genius, challenging narratives that attribute major achievements solely to individual brilliance rather than to collaborative effort and circumstance. The piece was widely interpreted as a commentary on the popular narrative surrounding Amazon's founding and her former husband's role in it.

Bystander Revolution

In 2014, Scott founded Bystander Revolution, an online anti-bullying organization. She has served as the organization's executive director since its inception. Bystander Revolution provides practical, crowd-sourced advice for dealing with bullying, offering short video content featuring individuals sharing strategies for responding to bullying situations. The organization reflects Scott's interest in using media and storytelling to address social problems, and it represented her first major independent public initiative.

Philanthropy

Scott's philanthropic career accelerated dramatically following her divorce from Jeff Bezos in 2019. As part of the divorce settlement, she received approximately 4 percent of Amazon's outstanding shares, making her one of the wealthiest people in the world. Almost immediately, she signaled her intention to devote the majority of this wealth to charitable causes.

In May 2019, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment created by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates in which signatories promise to give the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes during their lifetime or in their will. In her Giving Pledge letter, Scott wrote about the "disproportionate amount of money" she possessed and her intention to keep at it "until the safe is empty."

2020 Giving

Scott's philanthropic giving in 2020 drew widespread attention for its scale, speed, and approach. In July 2020, she announced that she had donated $1.7 billion to 116 organizations focused on racial equity, LGBTQ+ equality, gender equity, climate change, and other causes. Among the recipients were historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), community colleges, and organizations serving underrepresented communities.

In December 2020, Scott disclosed that she had given an additional $4.2 billion to 384 organizations over the preceding four months, bringing her total giving for the year to approximately $5.8 billion. This represented one of the largest annual distributions by a private individual to working charities in history. The recipients included food banks, emergency relief funds, and organizations addressing systemic inequities.

Scott's giving philosophy distinguished itself from traditional mega-philanthropy in several respects. She gave directly to existing organizations rather than creating a personal foundation, and she generally provided unrestricted funds — meaning recipients could allocate the money as they saw fit, rather than being bound to donor-specified programs. She also eschewed the naming rights and extensive public relations campaigns that typically accompany large-scale charitable giving, preferring instead to announce her donations through brief blog posts on Medium.

2021 and Beyond

In 2021, Scott continued her philanthropic activity, donating a further $2.7 billion to a range of organizations. Her giving continued through subsequent years at a pace that consistently outstripped that of most other individual donors worldwide. She employed teams of advisors to identify organizations with strong track records and leadership, particularly those serving communities that had historically been overlooked by traditional philanthropy.

By December 2025, Scott's cumulative charitable giving had reached approximately $26.3 billion, distributed to more than 1,600 organizations. In 2025 alone, Scott donated a reported $7.2 billion, a record annual total for her individual giving. Her 2025 giving exceeded the total lifetime charitable contributions of several prominent American billionaires.

Approach and Controversies

Scott's philanthropic model — characterized by large, unrestricted gifts to a wide array of organizations — has been both praised and criticized. Supporters have lauded her trust-based approach, arguing that unrestricted gifts empower recipient organizations to deploy resources where they are most needed. The speed and scale of her giving have also been cited as a corrective to the tendency among ultra-wealthy individuals to accumulate philanthropic pledges without disbursing funds in a timely manner.

However, the model has also attracted scrutiny. Because the gifts are unrestricted and often arrive with little advance notice, some recipient organizations have faced challenges in absorbing and responsibly deploying sudden influxes of capital. In one prominent example, Scott donated $20 million to Santa Barbara City College. Subsequent questions arose about how portions of the funds were utilized, prompting an investigation and the formation of a Board of Trustees committee to advise on the spending of the remaining approximately $13 million. The Santa Barbara City College case highlighted broader questions in philanthropy about the balance between donor trust and institutional accountability.

Some critics have also questioned whether Scott's approach, which bypasses the creation of a foundation with formal governance structures and public reporting requirements, provides sufficient transparency for gifts of such magnitude. Others have pointed out that even at her extraordinary pace of giving, the appreciation of her Amazon shares has at times caused her net worth to grow faster than she can give it away — raising structural questions about wealth concentration and the capacity of individual philanthropy to address systemic inequality.

Despite these debates, Scott's giving has been noted for its emphasis on organizations led by and serving communities of color, low-income communities, and other historically marginalized populations. Her donations have reached food banks, community colleges, HBCUs, arts organizations, immigrant services, domestic violence shelters, and numerous other types of nonprofits across the United States and internationally.

Personal Life

MacKenzie Scott married Jeff Bezos in 1993, and the couple moved from New York to Seattle in 1994 to launch Amazon. They have four children together. In January 2019, the couple announced their decision to divorce after 25 years of marriage. The divorce was finalized in April 2019. As part of the settlement, Scott received approximately 4 percent of Amazon's shares, while Bezos retained voting control over those shares.

Following the divorce, Scott adopted her middle name as her surname, changing her public identity from MacKenzie Bezos to MacKenzie Scott. She has maintained a relatively private personal life, rarely giving interviews and preferring to communicate through occasional blog posts and written statements.

Scott married Dan Jewett, a science teacher at the Lakeside School in Seattle, in 2021. Jewett briefly joined Scott in signing the Giving Pledge. The marriage ended in divorce in 2023.

As of December 2025, Scott held a 1.3 percent stake in Amazon, with an estimated net worth of approximately $40 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making her the third-wealthiest woman in the United States and the 40th-wealthiest person in the world.

Recognition

Scott has received significant recognition for both her literary and philanthropic work. In 2006, she won the American Book Award for her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, recognizing it as an outstanding contribution to American literature.

In 2020, Time magazine named Scott one of its 100 most influential people, citing the scale and velocity of her charitable giving. Forbes listed her among the world's 100 most powerful women in 2021, 2023, and 2025.

In September 2020, CNN reported that Scott had briefly become the world's richest woman, a position driven by the appreciation of Amazon's stock price. While this distinction was temporary and subject to fluctuations in stock valuation, it underscored the magnitude of the wealth Scott had committed to giving away.

Scott's philanthropic approach has itself become a subject of significant media coverage and academic discussion. Her model of large, unrestricted gifts to working organizations — rather than the establishment of a named foundation — has prompted a broader conversation within the nonprofit sector about donor practices, institutional trust, and the mechanics of large-scale wealth redistribution. Numerous nonprofit leaders have publicly credited Scott's gifts with transforming their organizations' capacity to serve their communities.

Legacy

MacKenzie Scott's legacy is defined by two distinct but interrelated contributions: her work as a literary novelist and her transformation of modern philanthropic practice. As a novelist, she produced work that earned critical recognition, including an American Book Award, establishing her as a literary figure in her own right.

It is in philanthropy, however, that Scott's impact has been most far-reaching. By distributing over $26 billion to more than 1,600 organizations in approximately six years, she has set a pace of charitable giving that is without precedent among living individual donors. Her emphasis on unrestricted gifts, trust-based philanthropy, and support for organizations serving historically marginalized communities has influenced broader discussions about how wealth should be redistributed and what obligations accompany extreme affluence.

Scott's approach stands in contrast to the foundation-centric model that has characterized much of American mega-philanthropy since the early twentieth century. By giving directly to existing organizations rather than building new institutional structures bearing her name, she has offered an alternative framework for large-scale charitable giving. Whether this model proves more effective or sustainable than traditional approaches remains a subject of ongoing analysis and debate.

Her role in Amazon's founding, while often overshadowed by her former husband's public profile, has also been the subject of increased attention and reassessment. Scott's 2018 essay challenging the "lone genius" narrative of entrepreneurial success contributed to broader cultural conversations about the collaborative nature of business creation and the unequal distribution of credit in corporate origin stories.

As both a literary artist and a philanthropist who has given away more wealth more quickly than virtually any private individual in history, MacKenzie Scott occupies a distinctive position in early twenty-first-century American life. The long-term effects of her charitable investments — in education, public health, racial equity, and economic opportunity — will continue to unfold in the years and decades ahead.