Taylor Hill/FilmMagic via Getty Images; Taylor Borden/Business Insider
MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced another 10-figure round of donations in a blog post on Tuesday.
Scott said she had given away $2.74 billion to 286 "high-impact organizations in categories and communities that have historically been underfunded and overlooked." Scott has emerged as a philanthropic powerhouse since her divorce from Bezos in 2019, and especially in the last year.
In July 2020, Scott announced that she had donated $1.7 billion of her wealth to 116 organizations in the previous year. In December, she said she had donated another $4.2 billion to 384 organizations in the past four months. This latest round of philanthropy announced Tuesday brings her total donations made public since July to roughly $8.5 billion.
Scott's separation from her e-commerce tycoon husband left her with a 4% stake in Amazon and immediately made her one of the wealthiest people on the planet. Her net worth of $59.8 billion earns her the 22nd spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In Tuesday's blog post, Scott said her giving stems from a desire to distribute wealth to nonprofits that strengthen communities like two- and four-year higher education institutions, arts and cultural institutions, and community-engagement organizations.
"Me, Dan, a constellation of researchers and administrators and advisors — we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change," Scott said. "In this effort, we 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."
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See Also:
- Amazon burns through workers so quickly that executives are worried they'll run out of people to employ, according to new report
- Elizabeth Warren rips into Jeff Bezos over his upcoming trip to space: 'He's laughing at every person in America who actually paid taxes'
- When Jeff Bezos was worth $18 billion, he claimed a $4,000 tax credit intended for families earning less than $100,000, ProPublica reports
