Mackenzie Scott is still worth $33 billion after donating $10 million every day for seven long years
Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has maintained a net worth of $33 billion even after donating about $10 million a day for the past seven years.The ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has donated more than $26 billion through 2,700 charitable gifts since 2019.
Although her current fortune makes her one of the richest people in the world, her official Amazon author bio shows a much more humble past.
While she was a student, she worked low-paying jobs, including dishwasher, waitress, deli cashier, nanny, and library monitor.Scott, 56, has spoken candidly about the financial difficulties she faced before becoming a billionaire. While studying at Princeton, her financial problems became so serious that her roommate, Jenny Ringo Tarkenton, found her crying because she could no longer afford her tuition.
The situation was resolved after Tarkenton helped her get a $1,000 loan so she could stay registered.
The minimum wage was $4.25 per hour
After graduating from Princeton University, where she worked as a research assistant to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, Scott moved to New York City to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. To pay her rent in the early 1990s, she worked several jobs, including waitressing and making sandwiches. At the time, the federal minimum wage was $4.25 per hour, while full-time restaurant workers earned an average hourly wage of $4.80, including tips.
Scott wrote letters to Morrison. She was later published by Fortune and described how difficult it was to balance service jobs with her writing career.“I think the only way I’ll ever find out what won’t work for me in life is to try it,” Scott wrote to her former mentor Toni Morrison.She also wrote, “I found myself facing small, unpredictable blocks of time during which I either collapsed in exhaustion and frustration, or contemplated the agonizing monotony of making and selling sandwiches, and worried about how I would pay my rent with the nickels they gave me for boredom.”Her life changed after she joined New York hedge fund DE Shaw, where she met Jeff Bezos (Jeff was earning $1.5 million to $2 million a year in today’s money). The two married and moved to Seattle to start Amazon in 1994, where Scott served as the company’s first accountant and manager. After their divorce in 2019, Scott took a 4 percent stake in Amazon. The company’s continued rise in share price has helped preserve its wealth, allowing its net worth to increase by more than $2 billion this year alone to between $33 billion and $43.8 billion, depending on market estimates, even after selling more than half of its original stake.
Scott’s philanthropy model has donated billions to charities
Through its philanthropic platform, Yield Giving, which launched in 2022, Scott gives away more than $4 billion annually on average. Instead of using the strict oversight common to many major donors, they offer unrestricted grants that allow organizations to decide for themselves how to spend the money.In 2025, its unrestricted donations sent hundreds of millions of dollars to educational institutions and cultural preservation groups.
Its largest gifts included $80 million to Howard University, $70 million to the United Negro College Fund, $50 million to Virginia State University, and $42 million to Alcorn State University. It also gave $60 million to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and $40 million to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.Many of the beneficiary organizations have praised the freedom that comes with Scott’s donations, but her approach has also faced backlash from some of her fellow tech billionaires.
Gary Tan, CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator, has publicly criticized the lack of oversight associated with grants.“MacKenzie Scott gave away $26 billion faster than anyone else in history — with no oversight or accountability for the chaos that followed,” Tan wrote in a post on X.He added: “This is not management. True charity requires real care and attention. Spill sugar on the floor? It will bring you ants.”Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also agreed with Tan’s criticism, responding to the post with one word: “Yes.”Despite criticism from some of the biggest and richest figures, Scott’s daily giving is greater than the combined charitable donations of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Larry Ellison.
