MacKenzie Scott Donates Another $2.7 Billion, Laments Wealth Gap

MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, has given away $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, who shook up the philanthropy world last year with the pace and magnitude of her giving, donated to 286 organizations from universities to arts nonprofits. 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 advisors — 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.”

Scott, who ended up with a 4% stake in Amazon.com Inc. following her divorce with Bezos, has quickly become one of the most consequential philanthropists in the world. Last year she likely set a record for the largest annual distribution by a living person. She’s worth almost $60 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.