Jeff Bezos’ Ex-wife MacKenzie Scott donates $7.1 billion in 2025 following amazon stake sale

MacKenzie Scott, a billionaire philanthropist and author, has had one of the most significant philanthropic years in history, in which she has donated over $7.1 billion to organizations around the world in 2025. This generous contribution is a part of a larger movement of technology wealth moving towards social impact. This $7.1 billion is also Scott’s largest annual charitable donation yet.

As an early employee and former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Scott has a history of significant philanthropy. This year, Scott continued her trend of liquidating her Amazon stockpile, as she reduced her stake in the e-commerce company by nearly 42%. This allowed her to liquidate over $60 billion in Amazon shares which she can now put to use to fund her philanthropic efforts.

In an essay that she published on her website, Yield Giving, Scott revealed that she donated to 186 organizations this year, all around the world. Some of the donations include colleges and universities, environmental nonprofits, and organizations working to expand equity and inclusion. In her essay, Scott put emphasis on how her donations were unrestricted and quickly went to work in the communities they were needed.

“This dollar total will likely be reported in the news,” Scott said in the post, “but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year.”

MacKenzie Scott’s giving strategy

Scott’s giving is different from what many philanthropists typically do. Her donations are often unrestricted and provided quickly. This method allows the nonprofits to use the money where it is needed most and build relationships that make the impact much more sustainable and long lasting. This year, she made history when she donated $80 million to Howard University, one of the largest gifts in the university’s 158-year history. She made this donation to go towards research, student services, and campus infrastructure. MacKenzie Scott’s other large donations went to other colleges and universities, student aid, and minority-serving institutions, as well as grassroots organizations across the U.S and the globe.

MacKenzie Scott’s journey from novelist and early Amazon employee to philanthropist is an ongoing conversation about how technology wealth can be reinvested to create social impact on a large scale. Since her divorce from Jeff Bezos in 2019, Scott’s total giving has topped $26 billion. Her method of giving has begun to inspire other tech-billionaires as well as global philanthropists.

Tech billionaires and their accumulation of wealth have been criticized in the past for a lack of structural investment in our social fabric. MacKenzie Scott’s unrestricted and speedy giving directly addresses that, and is a blueprint for how tech fortunes of the modern era can help foster human development.