First published June 16, 2021.
On 15 June 2021, author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott announced that she had given $2,739,000,000 (about $2.74 billion) to 286 organisations. The money went to groups working on racial and economic equity, education, the arts and community building, many of them chosen because they had long been underfunded. It was her third major round of giving in less than a year.
Here is what the announcement said, who received the money, how her approach differs from traditional philanthropy, and how her giving has grown since.
Who MacKenzie Scott is
MacKenzie Scott was born in San Francisco in 1970 and studied English at Princeton University, where Toni Morrison was one of her teachers. She is a novelist: her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright (2005), won an American Book Award, and her second, Traps, followed in 2013.
She married Jeff Bezos in 1993, a year before he founded Amazon, and worked at the company in its early days. When the couple divorced in 2019 she received Amazon shares then worth about $35.6 billion, making her one of the wealthiest women in the world. The same year she signed the Giving Pledge, a public promise to give away the majority of her fortune.
What the June 2021 announcement said
Scott announced the gifts in an essay on Medium titled "Seeding by Ceding". She explained that she and her team had spent the first three months of 2021 researching and evaluating nonprofit groups focused on equity in neglected areas, and that the process ended with gifts to 286 organisations.
The recipients fell into several broad groups:
- two- and four-year colleges and universities serving students who have long been underserved;
- organisations bridging divides between ethnic and religious groups, including interfaith work;
- smaller arts and cultural organisations serving overlooked communities and identity groups;
- groups tackling extreme poverty with local teams, leaders of colour and a focus on women and girls;
- organisations that support volunteering, community engagement and philanthropy itself.
A central theme of the essay was that the people doing the work deserve the attention, not the donor. Scott wrote that those "struggling against inequities deserve center stage in stories about change they are creating."
She also challenged the idea that great wealth is purely individual, arguing that "any wealth is a product of a collective effort" that includes the very people whose work she was funding.
Her earlier rounds of giving
June 2021 was not her first large gift. In July 2020 she gave about $1.7 billion to 116 nonprofits, reportedly including historically Black colleges and universities and organisations working on racial equity.
In December 2020 she announced about $4.15 billion to 384 organisations, reportedly with a focus on groups supporting communities hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. Some reports at the time described these as gifts to women-focused charities, but the December round was broader than that.
Together, the three rounds added up to more than $8.5 billion in roughly a year, an unusually fast pace for a single donor.
Why her approach stood out
Traditional philanthropy often works slowly. Large donors typically ask for detailed proposals, attach conditions, require regular reports and spread grants over years. Many also put money into private foundations that pay out only a small share each year.
Scott did almost the opposite. Many recipients reported learning of their gift by phone or email without having applied. The money came largely without restrictions, and recipients were encouraged to spend it however they chose. Unrestricted funds of this kind let them pay staff properly, build reserves or plan for the long term rather than chasing small project grants.
Critics raised fair questions. Some argued that a single wealthy person choosing hundreds of recipients, with little public explanation of how each was selected, concentrates power in a different way. Others pointed out that her fortune kept rising with Amazon's share price even as she gave money away. Scott later began publishing a database of her gifts, which made her giving easier to follow.
The role of Dan Jewett
In 2021 Scott was married to Dan Jewett, a science teacher at Lakeside School in Seattle. He was involved in choosing recipients, and in a letter of his own he said he was joining her commitment to pass on their wealth to serve others.
The couple later separated. Scott filed for divorce in September 2022, and it was finalised in January 2023. Her giving has continued under her own name.
How much she still had, and what came next
Even after giving away billions, Scott remained extremely wealthy in mid-2021. Estimates reported at the time put her fortune at close to $60 billion, which placed her among the richest women in the world. The figure rose and fell with Amazon's share price.
In 2022 she launched Yield Giving, a website and database that lists her gifts. By the end of 2025 she had reportedly given away about $26.3 billion to more than 1,600 organisations, making her one of the largest living philanthropists.
What the gifts tell us about modern giving
Scott's June 2021 round showed a different model of philanthropy: give quickly, trust the people closest to the problem and avoid making the donor the hero of the story. Whether every gift worked as hoped is something only the recipients can show over time, but many say the money and the freedom to use it changed what they could do.
For anyone thinking about their own giving, at any scale, the same principles apply. Research organisations carefully, consider unrestricted donations that let charities decide what they need most, and pay attention to the communities they serve, not just the headlines.
Sources: MacKenzie Scott, "Seeding by Ceding" (Medium, 15 June 2021); Wikipedia: MacKenzie Scott.
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