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MacKenzie Scott has donated over $400 million this fall alone to organizations focused on advancing education and DEI initiatives. She’s well known for her philanthropy, which turns out stems from a $1,000 loan her college roommate gave her.
“It is these ripple effects,” Scott said, “that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible.”
“Whose generosity did I think of when I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give?” Scott wrote in an October essay.
“It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”
After graduating from Princeton University in 1992, she worked as a research assistant for Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. Scott had studied under the author while she was a creative writing professor at Princeton. Scott also worked at a hedge fund, where she met Jeff Bezos.
The two married in 2003 and she became a key player in Amazon’s early years, serving as an accountant. She even shipped some of the startups first orders through UPS and helped brainstorm the company’s name.
“To me, watching your spouse, somebody that you love, have an adventure—what is better than that?” Scott had said in a CBS interview.
The two became the wealthiest couple in the world, though they tried to maintain a level of normalcy while raising their four children. (Like driving the kids to school in a Honda, according to “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone.)
At the same time, Scott was writing her first novel. She spent a decade on it, and published “The Testing of Luther Albright” in 2005. Toni Morrison, called it “a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”
She published her second novel, “Traps,” in 2013. In an interview with Charlie Rose, she said at its core revealed how our greatest worries and mistakes are often “the things that we’ll look back and be the most grateful for.”
When Scott divorced Bezos in 2019, she was left with a 4 percent stake in the company, translating to roughly 139 million shares.
Since 2020, Scott has donated around 58 million of those shares, cutting her stake by 42 percent. She has donated $19.25 billion to more than 2,450 nonprofits through her philanthropy, Yield Giving, which she launched in 2022. She’s still worth over $35 billion.
Her college roommate, Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, turned her instinct of giving into a career. She founded Funding U in 2015, which has since given $80 million in low-interest loans to roughly 8,000 students to pay for college.
Tarkenton said she’s always believed that Scott, and the thousands of other students she’s helped, would graduate either way. Still, she’s witnessed the impact support can have.
“[S]mall graces everywhere add up—or big graces, when it comes to MacKenzie’s [giving],” she said.
When the opportunity arose to loan money to Funding U and “support [Tarkenton’s] dream of supporting students like she once supported me,” Scott said she jumped at it.
“And to whom will each of the thousands of students thriving on those gratitude-powered student loans go on to give?” Scott wrote in a 2021 philanthropy essay. “None of us has any idea. Each unique expression of generosity will have value far beyond what we can imagine or live to see.”
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Ava Levinson
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