MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, donates US$2.7 billion and blasts wealth gap
- MacKenzie Scott became one of the world’s richest women upon her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos
- She has since given away more than US$8 billion in three rounds of contributions – each made public via a surprise announcement
MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, has given US$2.7 billion to a variety of charities, she wrote in a blog post Tuesday, bringing her total donations since her first giving spree in July 2020 to $8.5 billion.
Scott, 51, shook up the philanthropy world last year with the pace and magnitude of her giving. This time she gave to 286 organisations from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre to racial equity funds in philanthropy and journalism. This is her first time announcing donations since she remarried to Dan Jewett, a Seattle science teacher.
“Me, Dan, a constellation of researchers and administrators and advisers – we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” Scott wrote in the post.
“We are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.”
The past few years have been an extraordinary period for wealth creation among the 0.01 per cent. The world’s 500 richest people added US$1.8 trillion to their combined fortunes just in 2020, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The gains were particularly pronounced among tech titans, including Bezos, the richest person in the world.
Scott, who ended up with a 4 per cent stake in Amazon following her divorce, is worth almost US$60 billion. That’s even after her rapid giving that’s already made her one of the most consequential philanthropists in the world.