Back five years ago, MacKenzie Scott, novelist, philanthropist and the ex-wife of billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos, was briefly ranked the richest woman in the world.
Though that distinction no longer holds — she’s now the 40th wealthiest person, according to Bloomberg — that isn’t an indicator of her diminished success. Rather, in the wake of her divorce from the Amazon founder and former CEO, Scott has devoted her life to philanthropy, having made a number of record-breaking donations in recent years.
And she shows no signs of slowing down when it comes to continuing that mission.
Read on to learn all about the 55-year-old, from her career and personal relationships, to her mission to redistribute her wealth.
MacKenzie Scott’s Early Years
MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was born on April 7, 1970. Her mother, Holiday Tuttle, was a stay-at-home parent, and her father, Jason Baker Tuttle, was a financial adviser, according to a 2022 New York Times profile on Scott.
She graduated from Princeton University in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in English. One of her teachers there was Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, who went on to become a mentor to Scott.
Morrison was quoted by Vogue as having called Scott “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes . . . really one of the best.”
Proving her mentor proud, Scott won the American Book Award for her debut novel, 2005’s “The Testing of Luther Albright.” In 2013, she published her second novel, “Traps.”
MacKenzie Scott’s Marriage to Jeff Bezos
Scott met Bezos in 1992, while both were employed by the same investment management firm, D. E. Shaw & Co, according to the Times.
“My office was next door to his, and all day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,” she told Vogue in 2013. “How could you not fall in love with that laugh?”
It was a whirlwind romance that led the pair down the aisle just six months after their first date.
After saying their “I dos” in 1993, the two moved from their New York City home and set up for a new life and new business in Seattle. In 1994, Bezos created the then online bookstore Amazon, and Scott filed various vital roles at the then-burgeoning company.
Throughout their marriage Bezos raved about Scott’s support and how she had been instrumental in his own success as an entrepreneur.
“MacKenzie, you know, she had married this stable guy working on Wall Street, and a year after we got married, I went to her and said I wanted to quit my job, move across the country and start this internet bookstore. And MacKenzie, of course, like everybody I explained this to, her first question was: ‘What’s the internet?’ Because nobody knew. This was 1994,” Bezos explained in an interview with Mathias Döpfner for Business Insider. “But even before she could say ‘What’s the internet?’ she said, ‘Great — let’s go!’ Because she wanted to support it, and she knew that I had always had this passion for invention and starting a company.”
MacKenzie Scott and Jeff Bezos Divorced After 25 years
In a post Bezos shared on social media Jan. 9, 2019, signed by both he and Scott, the pair revealed they’d already been separated for some time and had made the decision to divorce.
“We want to make people aware of a development in our lives. As our family and close friends know, after a long period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends,” they wrote.
“We feel incredibly lucky to have found each other and deeply grateful for every one of the years we have been married to each other. If we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again. We’ve had such a great life together as a married couple, and we also see wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures. Though the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain cherished friends.”
After that, Scott, who’d taken Bezos’ name in marriage, chose to use what had been her middle name as her new last name.
The divorce, which was finalized that same year, resulted in Scott getting 4% of Amazon’s outstanding stock, according to Bloomberg, which was valued at $38.3 billion at the time. The tech stock boom that followed, amid the 2020 pandemic, saw her wealth surge to more than $66 billion, making her, for a time, the richest woman in the world.
MacKenzie Scott Is a Mother of 4
Bezos and Scott welcomed four children together over the course of their marriage, but the parents have shared few details about their brood, preferring privacy for the kids.
What is known is that in 2000, the former spouses started their family with the birth of their son Preston. In the years that followed, they had two more sons and adopted a daughter from China.
The names and ages of those children have never been revealed by Bezos or Scott. In fact, the only time the public got a glimpse of the family all together was in 2016, when they hit the red carpet at Comic-Con International in San Diego, California, for the big-screen premiere of “Star Trek Beyond.”
MacKenzie Scott’s Commitment to Philanthropy
Following her split from Bezos, Scott shared her intention to use her wealth to bolster existing charitable organizations, give to equity causes and assist a variety of non-profit groups.
“We are attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” she wrote in a blog post on Medium. “My team’s efforts 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. Though we still have a lot to learn about how to act on these beliefs without contradicting and subverting them, we can begin by acknowledging that people working to build power from within communities are the agents of change. Their service supports and empowers people who go on to support and empower others.”
She went on to explain how that approach, in the first quarter of 2021 alone, led to more than $2.7 billion in donations to 286 high-impact groups “that have been historically underfunded and overlooked.”
In 2022, Big Bothers Big Sisters of America revealed that the Scott made the highest donation from a single donor in the organization’s 118-year history with a gift of $122.6 million.
That same year, she made historic individual donations to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, devoting $275 million to its national office and affiliates, and to Girl Scouts of the USA, which received a donation of $84.5 million.
According to the Center for Effective Philanthropy, by 2025, Scott had given away over $19 billion in unrestricted donations to more than 2,000 organizations. After such giving, she no longer has a spot on Forbes’ list of the ten wealthiest women in the world.
MacKenzie Scott’s Second Marriage and Divorce
In March 2021, two years after her divorce from Bezos, Scott remarried.
Her marriage to Seattle science teacher Dan Jewett was announced on website for The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic organization through which Scott had already committed to give away the majority of her wealth over the course of her lifetime. In the site’s post, Jewett joined her in that promise.
After news of the nuptials became public, Bezos shared his support for the union in a statement to NBC News, saying, “Dan is such a great guy, and I’m happy and excited for the both of them.”
But the union proved to be a short one.
Scott filed for divorce from Jewett in September 2022.
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