MACKENZIE SCOTT GAVE AWAY $6.65 BILLION IN 2025
MacKenzie Scott donations totaled an estimated $6.65 billion in 2025, about one-third of all megagiving that year, Giving USA found.
Giving USA released its annual report, titled “Giving USA 2026: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2025,” on June 23, 2026. The Associated Press reported that the group put Scott’s 2025 contributions at $6.65 billion.
Fortune reported that donors made $19.2 billion in megagifts in 2025, and that Scott alone accounted for about a third of it. Fortune rounded her total to about $7 billion, citing Giving USA and Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
“It was a positive year for charitable giving, with virtually all categories of recipient organizations achieving solid or better growth at the aggregate level,” said Gabe Cooper, vice chair of Giving USA Foundation and founder and CEO of Virtuous.
How the year added up
Total U.S. charitable giving hit $617.2 billion in 2025. That figure counts donations from individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations to U.S. charities.
Scott’s money went to thousands of organizations, Fortune reported. They included groups focused on housing, diversity, equity and inclusion, and disaster recovery.
Her giving has now reached $26.2 billion over five years, Fortune said.
Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Susan and Michael Dell were also named among the year’s biggest megadonors.
A big giver who stays quiet
Despite the size of her giving, Scott was missing from the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s 2025 Philanthropy 50 list of top donors. Fortune said that was largely because her giving is not publicly reported the way many donors’ gifts are.
“MacKenzie Scott is among the notable absences on the Philanthropy 50 list,” the Chronicle of Philanthropy wrote.
The Chronicle added: “While it is possible she made gifts to her donor-advised funds that would have earned her a spot on the Philanthropy 50, she and her representatives declined to provide such information to the Chronicle.”
Fortune said Scott rarely offers insight into her donations and does not personally seek press coverage for them. She is the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and she signed the Giving Pledge after the divorce, promising to give away the majority of her net worth.
Fortune said her giving was inspired in part by past kindnesses, including a college roommate who lent her money so she could stay in school and a dentist who did free work when she could not pay.
Scott has written about the idea herself. “It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible,” she wrote in a December essay quoted by Fortune.
In the same essay, she wrote: “Generosity and kindness engage the same pleasure centers in the brain as sex, food, and receiving gifts, and they improve our health and long-term happiness as well.”
What came next
Yahoo Finance published a follow-up on October 14, 2026, listing several of Scott’s 2025 gifts.
They included $80 million to Howard University, $70 million to the United Negro College Fund, $60 million to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, $50 million to Virginia State University, $42 million to Alcorn State University and $40 million to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
The same article said Scott had not reported any donations for 2026 yet.
