Photo by JORG CARSTENSEN/dpa/AFP via Getty Images
On Tuesday, billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott published her yearly announcement of philanthropic gifts. Her donations totaled $7.2 billion, the largest yearly amount since she began publicizing her giving in 2019. Scott’s latest announcement brings her total lifetime giving to $26 billion. That makes her one of the three most generous donors in the U.S., per Forbes. Two far richer men, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, are the only Americans who have donated more to philanthropic causes, doling out an estimated $65 billion and $48 billion in their lifetimes. Scott’s latest set of gifts means that by Forbes’ calculations, she’s now apparently given more in dollar terms than Michael Bloomberg and George Soros—though Soros has still given away the highest percentage of his wealth; Scott is second by that metric. (Forbes estimated Bloomberg had given away $21.1 billion as of January, and Soros’ Open Society Foundations lists total donations of $24.2 billion.)
“This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year,” Scott wrote in an essay accompanying her gift announcement.
Scott’s donations went to approximately 200 publicized organizations, with a focus on higher education (including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, plus programs supporting Native and other underserved students) and climate (including the Global Methane Hub, ClimateWorks Foundation and an organization called Forests, People, Climate). While Scott is known for one-time, no-strings-attached gifts to grassroots organizations, the majority of this year’s grantees are organizations that have received funding from her in the past. Scott rarely comments publicly on her giving, apart from a series of essays posted to her website, Yield Giving.
Scott’s wealth comes from Amazon; she received approximately 400 million shares of the tech giant as part of her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos. Her ex-husband is the world’s third-richest man, worth $242 billion, but he has donated less than one-fifth of the dollar amount Scott has given away. Scott has already disposed of more than 75% of her shares—worth $52 billion if she sold them immediately and $72 billion if she’d held on—in just six years.
Forbes now estimates that Scott is worth $30 billion, down from her peak in 2021 of $59 billion. That’s based on a new assumption that she sells approximately half of the Amazon shares she disposes of outside of a tax-free charitable entity. (In 2022, Scott started unloading her Amazon shares far faster than she was giving her wealth away.) Had she had held onto them all, she would be worth $91 billion—enough to make her the world’s second-richest woman after Alice Walton.
Scott doesn’t have a traditional private foundation. Instead, Scott appears to be offloading a significant chunk of her Amazon shares to donor-advised funds, or DAFs; she has historically made some donations out of an account at the National Philanthropic Trust, a major DAF sponsor. Unlike private foundations, which require donors to give away at least 5% of its assets each year and report revenue, assets and every gift on a publicly accessible tax form, DAFs don’t mandate a certain speed of giving or essentially any disclosure while still providing similar tax benefits. If Scott aims to give “until the safe is empty,” as she wrote in a previous Yield Giving essay, transferring Amazon shares to a DAF before selling them also allows her to avoid capital gains taxes (23.8% nationally plus another 7% that Washington state enacted in 2023. She can then reinvest the tax-free proceeds into impact investments supporting affordable housing, women’s health and culturally-sensitive teletherapy, as she wrote she’d started doing last year, and hold them in a DAF indefinitely.
“There are many ways to influence how we move through the world, and where we land,” Scott wrote in her essay announcing her 2025 gifts, encouraging others to lean into their versions of kindness and generosity. Scott’s method of influence is clearly philanthropy: she’s now given away more than 46% of her wealth, second to the 95-year-old Soros. Only 11 members of the Forbes 400 list of Richest Americans have given away more than 20%; most have given away far less than 5%.