Receiving money from MacKenzie Scott is like winning the lottery, except hardly any recipients bought a ticket. Scott, whose wealth comes from the Amazon stock she received as part of her divorce from Jeff Bezos, has developed a novel method for giving away her billions. She and her team finds organizations that are unsexy but have competent leadership—community colleges, HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions have been favorites of late—and Scott gives them a no-strings-attached sum of money often large enough to be transformative but not so large as to overwhelm them.
So far she has given away $26 billion, and has $40 billion or so to go. Scott requires no follow up from recipients. There are zero buildings, plazas or endowed chairs named after her. She has declined to talk to the media, beyond the essay she writes each time she gives a new round of grants. In her most recent missive in December 2025, she extolled the acts of generosity that people do every day, which dwarf, she wrote, the $7.2 billion she had donated, and might have far-reaching consequences. “It is these ripple effects,” she wrote, “that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible.”
