Where her Amazon shares came from
Scott's fortune comes from Amazon stock. She married Jeff Bezos in 1993, the year before he left a job on Wall Street to start an online bookstore in Seattle. She was part of the company from its first days, helping with accounting, early contracts and the practical work of getting a small startup running. As Amazon grew into one of the largest companies in the world, the couple's shares grew with it.
When the couple divorced in 2019, Scott received about four percent of Amazon's outstanding shares, while Bezos kept voting control over her stake as part of the settlement. That block of stock made her one of the wealthiest women in the world overnight. Because her wealth came through marriage and divorce rather than a company she founded and ran, it is usually described as not self made, although she did contribute to Amazon's earliest period.
Since the divorce, Scott has steadily sold Amazon shares and given away the proceeds. Her net wealth has therefore moved with two forces: the share price of Amazon, and the pace at which she sells stock to fund her giving. Public filings have shown her holding falling over time as donations rise.
Holdings and the giving vehicle
Unlike most people with fortunes of this size, Scott does not run a family office with a broad portfolio of companies, or at least none that she has made public. Her main known asset is her remaining Amazon stock, together with cash and investments built from earlier share sales.
Her charitable activity is organized through Yield Giving, the name she adopted for her philanthropy. Instead of a traditional foundation with a large endowment and a staff that solicits proposals, her team researches organizations quietly and then makes large, unrestricted gifts. Recipients can spend the money however they see fit, and they are not asked to file lengthy reports.
In 2023 Yield Giving ran an open call for community organizations in the United States, the first time it accepted applications rather than choosing recipients on its own. A panel of other nonprofits helped review the entries.
Scott publishes summaries of her gifts on the Yield Giving website and in occasional essays. She has said she wants recipients to be in the spotlight rather than herself, and she generally avoids interviews, public events and naming rights.
Princeton, writing and the early Amazon years
MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was born in 1970 in San Francisco. She studied English at Princeton University, where the novelist Toni Morrison was one of her teachers and later described her as one of the best students she had taught. After graduating in 1992, she took a job at the investment firm D. E. Shaw in New York, where she met Jeff Bezos, who interviewed her.
They married in 1993 and drove across the country to Seattle in 1994, with Bezos writing a business plan along the way. Scott worked at the new company during its first years before turning her attention to writing and to raising the couple's four children.
Her first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, was published in 2005 and won an American Book Award the following year. Her second, Traps, came out in 2013. In 2014 she founded Bystander Revolution, an organization that collected practical advice from young people and public figures on how to respond to bullying.
After her divorce she changed her surname to Scott, her middle name. She married a teacher, Dan Jewett, in 2021, and they divorced in 2023.
Unrestricted giving at large scale
Scott signed the Giving Pledge in May 2019, shortly after her divorce was announced, committing to give away the majority of her wealth. She wrote at the time that she would keep at it until the safe was empty.
Her giving began in earnest in 2020 and quickly drew attention for both its speed and its style. Gifts have gone to historically Black colleges and universities, community colleges, food banks, housing groups, public health organizations, organizations working on racial and gender equity, and local nonprofits in parts of the United States that rarely attract large donors. Many recipients said the gift was the largest they had ever received.
Because her grants carry no restrictions, they have shaped wider debates in philanthropy about trust in grantees and the burden that reporting rules put on small charities. Several other donors and foundations have cited her approach when loosening their own requirements.
Scott rarely speaks in public. Her views appear mainly in essays posted online, in which she explains her choices and highlights the work of the organizations she supports.