MacKenzie Scott has revealed where her latest set of donations have gone, as the $2 billion she’s given in 2024 is just a part of the countless charitable actions she’s undertook since her divorce from Jeff Bezos in 2019.
Ex-wife to Jeff Bezos MacKenzie Scott has become well-known for her philanthropic actions, and has been one of the most prolific givers when it comes to charities in the past few years.
She recently sold around 45 million Amazon shares, an equivalent of roughly $8,000,000,000 at the time, and a blog post by Scott on Yield Giving revealed that she’s donated “about $2,004,400,000 in gifts” to 199 different organizations in 2024.
MacKenzie Scott is known for her mass charitable actions since her divorce from Bezos (Greg Doherty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
She has previously explained the reasons behind her charitable actions, but the new post reveals that she specifically wants to ‘invest’ in people in order to “devote resources for a useful purpose,” to “endow with rights,” and “to clothe.”
Around 75% of the organizations that she donated to are non-profits specifically targeted with helping “support the economic security and opportunity of people who are struggling,” with things like access to affordable housing, job stability, education, healthcare, and so much more.
It is also revealed that Scott intends to specifically target for-profit solutions to the outlined challenges, in an effort that aims to address the issues twice by ‘unlocking economic mobility’ and also ‘creating value’ through the experience of non-profit teams.
Many have pointed out Scott’s rather unorthodox giving approach, where she favors to provide traditionally smaller donations to a wider range of charities and non-profits instead of larger funds to more established areas.
This approach has been known to not only help areas that are often overlooked, but also assist in garnering further donations from other sources, as Scott’s work puts a focus these organizations for others to take notice of.
For example, she lists all 199 different organizations that she’s donated to in the Yield Giving blog, providing links for anyone to easily access.
Scott remains still one of the richest people in the world despite giving away billions of her fortune (Jorg Carstensen/dpa/AFP via Getty Images)
It’s also clear that Scott is far from done with her charitable actions, as the $2 billion donated in 2024 is just a fraction of the roughly $19.3 billion she has donated so far across the last few years.
She remains one of the richest individuals in the world with a fortune of around $40.3 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, ranking her 39th overall in a list where her ex-husband holds the second spot.
Alongside this, she still holds around 139 million Amazon shares, which equates to around $30.7 billion at the time of writing – but based on her recent actions it’ll only be a matter of time before these are sold off again, causing her place on the billionaires list to fall further. We don’t think she’ll mind too much though.
Featured Image Credit: Michael Kovac/Stringer / Kevork Djansezian/Staff / Getty
Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott explains why she keeps giving her money away
She pledged to donate at least half of her fortune
Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife has explained why she keeps giving her money away.
MacKenzie Scott divorced the billionaire in 2019 after he disclosed that he was having an affair with former news anchor Lauren Sánchez.
And Scott walked away with a huge settlement – in fact, it was the largest settlement ever to be awarded in a divorce.
The couple divorced in 2019 (Toni Anne Barson/Getty Images)
She received a whopping $38 billion in Amazon stocks, instantly making her the fourth wealthiest woman in the world.
So, nearly six years on from the split, what has Scott been spending her money on?
It turns out that she has been making some pretty sizable donations.
As reported by the New York Times: “They came like gifts from a Secret Santa, $20 million here, $40 million there, all to higher education, but not to the elite universities that usually hog all the attention.
“These donations went to colleges and universities that many people have never heard of, and that tended to serve regional, minority, and lower-income students.”
The president of Prairie View A&M University, Ruth Simmons, revealed that she was ‘stunned’ to learn that Scott was gifting the institution $50 million.
She explained that she had thought she’d misheard the figure and the caller had to repeat ‘five zero’.
It’s the biggest donation the university has ever received.
Writing for Medium, Scott explained that the pandemic inspired her to increase her charitable endeavors and in 2020 alone she gave away $6 billion.
The couple were married for 25 years (Jean-Paul Aussenard/WireImage/Getty Images)
She said: “This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling.
“Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires.”
Scott also shared that she had been donating to ‘communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital’.
Donating her fortune to worthy causes was something that she had promised to do around the time of her divorce.
And just months after the settlement had been reached, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, which is a commitment to give away at least half of your wealth.
She’s in good company – the pledge is led by Bill and Melinda Gates and has been signed by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan as well as George Lucas and Michael Bloomberg.
In a letter, Scott said: “We each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand. In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share.
“My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care.”
Featured Image Credit: Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for The New York Times/Toni Anne Barson/Getty Images
Jeff Bezos ‘almost killed’ by ex-Amazon assistant on her first assignment
She described shaking so much she could ‘barely hold a pen’
In 2002, Ann Hiatt was hired at tech giant Amazon but she didn’t expect her first task from CEO Jeff Bezos to nearly put his life in danger.
Hiatt shared her story on the YouTube channel Partnering Leadership with host Mahan Tavakoli.
‘My very first assignment Jeff gave me was to help him go and look at properties in Texas,’ she described.
She also mentioned this being the first time Bezos addressed her by name.
‘And he walked up to my desk […] with a piece of paper that had a long series of numbers on it and he said I need to visit these properties next week.
‘And I thought is this another brain teaser,’ Hiatt said, puzzled at the seemingly muddled series of numbers instead of actual addresses.
@annhiatt/Instagram
Turns out they were GPS coordinates for ‘very large plots of land that he was considering buying in Texas’ – and no one knew why.
Back then, there was no Google Maps, so Hiatt had to figure out the best way for Bezos to visit these properties with very limited time.
Initially, she went to her manager claiming the task was ‘impossible’ given the very short timeframe but was met with: ‘No is not an answer.’
Fortunately, she managed to get the job done by hiring a helicopter service to take Bezos to the properties and back.
Then, one day she got a call from the charter pilots who were filing the paperforms for Bezos’ return flight home the next day.
‘But they had heard an emergency beacon go off and there had been a helicopter crash in the area,’ the former Amazon employee recalled.
‘They didn’t know if it was him [Bezos]. There was no way to know, it was just one of those automatic beacons.’
She mentioned badly shaking to the point she ‘couldn’t hold a pen’ as it dawned on her that she may have just killed the Jeff Bezos.
‘And I just think to myself: “I just killed Jeff Bezos” and then it occurs to me that if I just killed Jeffo Bezos, the entire company was going to crumble.
‘Because at that point all of our stock value, all of our investors and shareholders were invested in […] the unique mind that was Jeff. And that might have just disappeared.’
Turns out, Bezos was in the crash but not only was he completely safe but became a hero, rescuing everyone inside. He then called for help using a satellite phone that Hiatt ‘insisted he should take.’
Fun fact! That property Bezos later bought became the base for his space company, Blue Origin.
Featured Image Credit: @annhiatt/Instagram / Dan Istitene – Formula 1/Contributor via Getty
Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife sells off $8,000,000,000 in Amazon shares to fund something very important
The soaring stock price has allowed her to give back in a big way
Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has been using her Amazon-bound fortune for good, after selling off billions in shares to give to countless charities and nonprofits.
MacKenzie Scott became the third wealthiest woman in the entire world following her divorce from Jeff Bezos in 2019, earning stocks worth around $35.6 billion because of her contributions to Amazon from the very beginning.
Unlike Bezos however, who frequently appears atop the list of the richest individuals in the world, Scott has vowed to give away most of her fortune, helping those in need with extremely generous donations.
MacKenzie Scott has donated much of her post-divorce fortune to charity (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
She has just recently sold another $8 billion worth of Amazon shares in order to fund her charitable ventures, which equates to around 11% of her overall total.
As reported by Yahoo! Finance, Scott has sold or donated 255 million Amazon shares – around $37 billion in current value – since divorcing Bezos, with almost all of it going to various charities and nonprofit organizations.
It is recorded that her charitable donations exceed $17 billion across over 2,300 nonprofits, which brings her towards the top of the list when it comes to charitable individuals in the US – one could argue the inverse of Bezos who has increased his own fortune.
While Amazon’s current executive chairman has invested his fair share into different companies, including some that are researching life-extending drugs, Scott’s interests lie in those that help the many, and she often stipulates that there are no conditions for companies receiving her donations.
She has also donated to a wide range of different organizations, including abortion pill delivery services, relief for rural communities, the Howard University College of Medicine, and the Asian-American Journalists Association.
Scott has targeted a wide range of charities with multi-million dollar donations (Jorg Carstensen/dpa/AFP via Getty Images)
She has even gone as far to donate her own mansions to charity, giving away her two Beverly Hills domiciles in a fortune that soars beyond $55 million.
While Scott’s single donation numbers are comparatively small when placed next to some other billionaires, often not exceeding the $10 million mark according to Benzinga, the significantly wide-scale nature of her actions more than makes up for the ‘lower’ monetary values.
Some have even stated that Scott’s donations have emboldened companies in the eyes of other philanthropists, opening them up for further donations beyond her initial actions.
While Bezos remains seemingly happy post-divorce, having now become engaged to his fiancé Lauren Sánchez, it is hard to ignore the disparity between the pair’s actions with their post-break-up fortunes.
Featured Image Credit: Jerod Harris / Stringer / Taylor Hill / Contributor / Getty
Amazon CEO reveals ’embarrassing’ moment Jeff Bezos called him out in a huge meeting
He felt awkward being put on the spot
It can be pretty awkward when your boss singles you out, especially in front of everyone.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy admitted the time this happened to him during a meeting.
The CEO talks about the importance of ‘earning trust’ in business on the Inside Amazon channel on YouTube.
He described the ways to earn trust as a leader like delivering results, speaking up, owning mistakes, being self-critical, fixing issues, and using the data to back up claims.
Leaders must also speak their minds even when it’s ‘awkward or embarrassing.’
To illustrate his point, Jassy shared a personal story.
Thos Robinson / Stringer / Getty
‘I’ll tell you a short story that’s a personal story,’ he said. ‘It’s a little bit embarrassing but I’ll share it.’
Jassy explains that back in the early 2000s, when he was co-leading the marketing team, he had to present their operating plan to the sales team.
‘Back then, we were still using PowerPoint presentations. We had a slide deck that was 220 slides if you can believe, it was a six-hour meeting,’ Jassy explained.
‘I was presenting the first 80 slides,’ Jassy said describing his moment of interruption.
Just ten slides in, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos interrupted him saying: ‘All your numbers are wrong on this slide.’
Taken aback, Jassy responded by asking the Blue Origin founder why he made such a bold statement.
‘Within a few seconds of him starting to dissect these numbers, I realised that he was right,’ Jassy said realising that all the numbers were indeed incorrect.
‘I was, of course, embarrassed and I said you’re right.’
Karwai Tang / Contributor / Getty
Bezos kept his CEO on the spot, replying: ‘Why should I believe anything else in this presentation if those numbers are wrong?’
Surprisingly though, the meeting did continue, covering the whole 200 slides.
‘It was a very good learning experience,’ Jassy admitted in the video. ‘I wasn’t resentful or mad at Jeff for pointing that out.’
Instead, he views it as a ‘very valuable lesson on what it means to dive deep and what it means to have ownership over the detail in your presentations.’
To sum up his story, Jassy says he earned Bezos’ trust by owning up to his mistakes, being vocally self-critical and using the experience to improve for next time.
Despite the awkward encounter, Jassy believes he’s become a better presenter because of it.
