MacKenzie Scott is widely known for the extraordinary pace at which she has given away her fortune, often handing large grants to organisations with few restrictions on how the money should be spent. But years before her name became closely associated with billionaire philanthropy, she was backing a much smaller and less publicised cause.
By July 2020, Scott had already announced approximately $1.7 billion in donations to 116 organisations, according to a Forbes report. As reported in the Forbes 2022 report, Scott had given $8.6 billion to 780 organisations. In 2023, Harvard Business School researchers described Scott as one of the most influential figures in philanthropy and highlighted the speed of her giving and her willingness to give up control with $15 billion in 5 years.
The recipients worked across areas including racial and gender equity, economic mobility, public health, climate change and other social issues. The grants covered a wide range of causes, while the organisations themselves were generally given considerable freedom over how to use the money.
MacKenzie Scott’s charitable journey began well before her vast fortune
In 2014, Scott founded Bystander Revolution, an organisation focused on bullying and encouraging people to intervene when they witnessed it. The project reflected an interest in social issues that existed well before her 2019 divorce from Jeff Bezos turned her into one of the world’s wealthiest women. Bystander Revolution offered a glimpse of the causes she cared about before she inherited a vast personal fortune through her 2019 divorce settlement. Scott’s life changed dramatically in 2019 when her marriage to Bezos ended. When Scott made her promise in 2019, she did not announce a detailed blueprint for spending her fortune.
At the time, Scott was better known as an author and the mother of four than as a major philanthropist. She had also worked at Amazon during its early years. The Bystander Revolution offered a glimpse of her charitable interests before she gained control of a vast fortune and began distributing billions of dollars to causes around the world. Scott had largely stayed out of the public spotlight during her marriage to Bezos. She was an author and mother of four, and she had also worked at Amazon during its early years, including on accounting and contract-related work. Her public profile was far smaller than that of her husband. The organisation focused on bullying and the idea that people who witness harmful behaviour can play a role in stopping it. It was not yet the kind of large-scale philanthropy that would later define Scott’s name. Her charitable interests at the time also included issues such as marriage equality, housing for homeless families and scholarships for undocumented students brought to the US as children. As part of the divorce settlement, she received a substantial Amazon stake, giving her a fortune of a scale that few people ever control. Rather than simply holding on to that wealth, she quickly began discussing how she intended to distribute it. Scott did not suddenly begin engaging with social causes after becoming one of the world’s wealthiest women. Her later giving simply operated on a vastly different scale. The transformation was remarkable. A woman who had once maintained a relatively low profile became a major force in global philanthropy almost immediately after receiving her share of the Amazon fortune. Scott’s anti-bullying work and her later philanthropy may look very different on the surface. One was a focused organisation built around a specific social problem. The other involves billions of dollars distributed across thousands of nonprofits and causes. But there is a thread connecting them: a willingness to put resources behind people and organisations trying to address social problems. That became particularly clear in Scott’s later philosophy. Rather than positioning herself as the person with all the answers, she has generally argued that the organisations doing the work should have the freedom to decide what they need. The Giving Pledge remains a useful marker of that shift. Instead, she emphasised acting rather than waiting. The result has made her one of the most consequential individual donors of her generation. Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.
The anti-bullying organisation she founded years earlier shows that philanthropy and social issues were already part of her public work.
In May 2019, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away at least half of her wealth during her lifetime or in her will.
She wrote that she would continue giving until her “safe” was empty Scott’s later philanthropy became striking not simply because of its size, but because of how little control she sought over the organisations receiving it. Her pledge went further than a conventional promise to donate. Instead of creating a traditional foundation with a large bureaucracy and extensive grant-making process, she increasingly favoured unrestricted donations. The idea was simple: organisations working on the ground often know better than a wealthy donor how money should be spent. Her philosophy was captured in her Giving Pledge letter. Scott wrote about the danger of saving resources for some supposedly better moment in the future and argued for acting on the impulse to give.