(He declined to cite the specific amount. CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) - Billionaire novelist and venture philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has donated nearly $4.2 billion to 384 organizations as part of a plan to donate a majority of her fortune. MacKenzie Scott, former wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, said she donated over $4.2 billion in the last four months to 384 organizations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington D.C., that address pressing needs amid the coronavirus pandemic, … “Famously, this involves having a theory of change or a strategy that exists in the heads of the donor, and then you select the nonprofits that receive the funds on the basis of executing your theory of change — so the nonprofits become subcontractors for your own vision. “Maybe 30 hours a week on top of my course load. MacKenzie Scott announces sizable donations MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, said in a blog post that she has given away $4.2 billion of her fortune in the past four months. At the time, Amazon was one of several competitors trying to figure out online bookselling, and it was unclear who would win, if any: Barnes & Noble, Borders, and independent bookstores seemed impenetrable. MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, said Tuesday she has given $4.2 billion to groups helping the vulnerable, as the pandemic hits lives like "a wrecking ball." MacKenzie Scott announced this week she has made gifts of almost $1.7 billion to 116 nonprofit entities. "There are lots of resources each of us can pull from our safes to share with others — time, attention, knowledge, patience, creativity, talent, effort, humor, compassion. Learn more about their experience and the impact they hope this giving will have on philanthropy overall, in these interviews. Including $14 million to a Michigan organization she's never worked with before. Within books-obsessed Amazon, though, Scott didn’t distinguish herself as a books enthusiast, as a fiction writer, or as much more than the boss’s pleasant wife who handled numbers. You’re not identifying people who have great ideas and giving them money,” says Reich, the author of Just Giving. “Entrepreneurs, they and their stories suck up all the oxygen — in a family, in a gathering, with friends, in any kind of setting,” she says. The “announcement is an announcement of her power, and power, wherever it is wielded in a democratic society, deserves scrutiny.” An undisclosed detail — whether she gave directly, through a foundation, or through an LLC — translates into important tax advantage distinctions, different disclosure requirements, and other specifics like whether or not she can support political causes. Many of the interview questions centered around her husband. The young woman who’d wanted to be a writer since she was six delved into Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. “I picked books as the first, best product to sell online after making a list of, like, 20 different products,” he told an interviewer in 1997. As of early October, a single share of Amazon hovers above $3,000. The reality was much more nuanced. She even asked to swap out sports requirements for writing projects. Scott grew up wealthy, with one house in a tony Marin County, California town and a sprawling mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights, according to government and property records. The early work environment celebrated literature and wonkiness. It’s the truth. Meanwhile, Bezos was just getting started. “I hopped on my Schwinn and rode to the library to hunt down a botanical encyclopedia, and for the next year, all my stories were stuffed with extraneous mentions of trees and flowers,” Scott wrote in an addendum to her first novel. “There are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far,” he said, so an online bookstore was “a business plan that made sense in the context of that internet growth.”. Humble! Shaw, and in 1994, with Scott at the wheel and Bezos in the passenger’s seat typing a business plan for an online bookstore, they drove to Seattle. She loved Nabokov and Dickens and Melville, according to an addendum to her first novel. For Scott, books were art. Though she could’ve chosen financial stability and predictability after all the upheaval she had been through, Scott instead embraced the risk. In the Traps interviews, Scott, who friends and acquaintances say dresses in an understated manner and avoids flashy security, cars, or clothing, emphasized that she drove a Honda minivan to take their kids to school and to soccer practice. Three months after meeting at Shaw, Bezos and Scott got engaged. 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A $40 million gift from Mackenzie Scott to Morgan State University is the largest single private donation in the University's history. MacKenzie Scott is an author and the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to whom she was married for 25 years. Learn how every donor can learn from the MacKenzie Scott Philanthropy Playbook and apply these seven lessons to improve every aspect of their giving. In American society, wealth often equals power, so a very wealthy donor can have tremendous influence over an organization unless they’re taking these very intentional steps not to,” she says. “MacKenzie Scott, by virtue of the amount of money she has, has an obligation to be more transparent about the structure she set up for her philanthropies and her future intentions,” Reich says. While that approach might work for some problems, like finding a treatment for a tropical disease, more entrenched issues like poverty or racism don’t have such straightforward answers and controllable outcomes. Take a look, https://marker.medium.com/inside-the-surreal-and-emotional-, The Real Reason So Many Companies Are Ditching Trump, The Inside Story of How the Lowly PDF Played the Longest Game in Tech, Actually, That Absurd Axe Tweet Is Important, Scott Galloway’s 7 Business Predictions for 2021, Slack’s Outage Was the Best Thing That Could Have Happened to the Company, What Investors See in Affirm, the First Big Tech IPO of 2021. Yet, other than the recipient groups, categories, and broad amounts, she didn’t reveal much about how she gave the money away or how she may give in the future, which concerns some critics. © 2021 Forbes Media LLC. The Seattle Times described Amazon in 2012 as being a “virtual no-show in hometown philanthropy.” It also has long been criticized for paying so little in corporate taxes. In April 2019, Scott posted her first ever tweet to lay out terms of their divorce affecting shareholders. “A civilization this imbalanced is not only unjust, but also unstable,” she wrote, as she laid out the areas she’d contributed to, from “empathy and bridging divides” to “functional democracy.” Scott worked with the consulting firm Bridgespan Group to vet nonprofits, and wrote that she tried to choose groups led by people of color, women, or LGBTQ people where possible. Consider Bill and Melinda Gates’ highly specific grants in areas like leadership development for malaria control workers in Africa; Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s targeted grants addressing science and education goals; and Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective funding Jobs’ approach to solving Chicago street violence. MacKenzie Scott (née Tuttle, formerly Bezos; April 7, 1970) is an American novelist and philanthropist.As of 30 December 2020, she has a net worth of US$59.8 billion, making her the second-wealthiest woman in the world, and the 18th-wealthiest individual overall. As part of the divorce settlement, Jeff transferred 25% of his Amazon stake to MacKenzie, which was 4% of the company. Even though billionaires thrived during the pandemic and massively grew their fortunes, the amount they donated to charitable causes remained at historic lows last year. A couple years later, she read Watership Down and noticed it was filled with the names of plants. We found 31 records in 20 states for Mackenzie Scott in the US. His name was Jeff Bezos. Years later, Jorgensen was reading Publishers Weekly and was surprised to see a review of a novel by Scott. The caller told him Point Foundation was getting a major gift — one of the largest it had ever received, Valencia says — from MacKenzie Scott. Mackenzie Scott is a property and general news reporter based in Brisbane. “To put it really crudely, technocratic philanthropy is philanthropy that is done to people rather than with people.”. As for Scott, once the divorce was final, she signed the Giving Pledge, saying she’d give away most of her fortune, joining people including Larry Ellison, Pierre and Pam Omidyar, and Bill and Melinda Gates — though her ex, notably, has not signed the pledge. HOUSTON - Writer and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott brought Christmas early to hundreds of organizations to the tune of $4.16 billion as part of a giving pledge she announced last year. “I don’t remember him getting excited about authors coming: He was just focused on the business — he was more into the numbers of how many visitors the website had,” remembers Jorgensen. This week on The Countdown, we're taking a look at the five richest American women, led by Alice Walton and Mackenzie Scott. Scott, who has published two novels, was a student of author Toni Morrison at Princeton and worked as a research assistant for her. He’s a very social guy. A review of the biggest individual donors of 2019, according to Forbes, illustrates this tendency: a couple with a fruit-and-nut fortune pledged $750 million to Caltech to fund a climate change research center named after them; Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry now bears the name of a hedge fund founder who made a $125 million donation. A year earlier, the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun investigating her father and his investment firm after a complaint. Scott seemed comfortable ceding the spotlight to her husband, but it also meant she was often cast as wife-of rather than as her own person. Among the groups she funded were Facing History and Ourselves, which provides resources to teachers on complex historical topics involving bigotry or hate, and Oweesta, a group focused on economic opportunities for Native people. This year the American Indian Graduate Center celebrates its 5oth anniversary of service to college-bound Native American students. In the week through October 9, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was the second biggest gainer, up $3.5 billion. Munroe said yes, and at this point, he said, he was imagining perhaps a 25, 50, maybe even a $100,000 donation. “His lavish spending was the reason the firm was unable to refund much of the funds it owed to clients,” the judge wrote. It had an IPO in 1997; after that, employees watched the stock price on their computer terminals and “some people wrote little tools to monitor how much they were worth by the minute,” Kochmer says. In 2005, Scott published the book, The Testing of Luther Albright, about an emotionally distant engineer who recounts his work life and complex relationships with his wife and son. Scott, formerly married to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, wanted to give a … To say that the donation can be transformative is an understatement. This stood out particularly in Seattle, where the corporate culture, shaped by hometown companies Nordstrom, Microsoft, Costco, Starbucks, and others, was of giving back. “You can imagine, when that article was sent to me, the questions that come into one’s mind: Are they going to let me go, because if they were to hire someone who wasn’t of color, the organization might get more money?” he says. Her father, Jason Baker Tuttle, ran a San Francisco investment firm, while her mother, Holiday, was active in the philanthropy scene — a report in the 1970s from the prestigious Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco mentions her mom chaired a fundraising group that organized a nine-course dinner to raise money for the museum. And she treasured check-ins from Toni Morrison encouraging her to keep writing, as she told Rose. © 2021 Forbes Media LLC. Still, she wanted to be a writer. For some of these institutions, this is the largest individual donation received all at once. Employees had to provide SAT scores before getting hired, and once they were on staff, competed to throw around big words. and we’d go, ‘Yay! Amid all the talk of books, few co-workers knew of Scott’s literary pedigree and ambitions. 2020’s Biggest Charitable Donations [Infographic], Delaware State University Is Moving Forward With Acquisition of Wesley College, A Major New Education Donor Avoids Some Pitfalls But Needs To Dig Deeper, Bachelor of Arts/Science, Princeton University. The extra publicity didn’t lift book sales much; Traps sold about the same as Luther. SEATTLE (AP) — MacKenzie Scott, philanthropist, author and former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has announced that she has given away $4.1 billion in the past four months to hundreds of organizations as part of a giving pledge she announced last year. (She later told Vogue that she pursued him.) The average Mackenzie Scott is around 50 years of age with around 45% falling in to the age group of 21-40. It is hard not to picture Scott in her car, eyes flicking at the rearview mirror, security guards ready to protect and to pounce, questioning interactions, avoiding public inquiries, thinking about how to give away a near oppressive amount of money to correct an unjust society that her wealth helped shape, about to leave her mansion and go pick up her kids as she tries to create for herself and them a thing money can’t buy: a normal life. The actress, trying to feel like a regular person, drives herself around, but this creates more work for the guards who have to protect her than just chauffeuring her would. Donations by MacKenzie Scott and Jeff Bezos reveal different priorities and approaches. With a gift of that size, Scott could’ve built a cancer center, had a museum wing named after her, made a college rededicate itself in her name. Among the recipients are six HBCUs and a number of educational organizations dedicated to increasing access for historically underrepresented groups. Hearing “that giant laugh” of his, she has said, she became intrigued. When Scott gave a reading at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Bezos attended and bought a book, recalls Rick Simonson, senior buyer at the store. But will her gifts have any more impact? For her new husband, books were an opportunity. Plus, the speed with which she reviewed the nonprofits and gave the money, with little tracking, raises some concern that the groups won’t use it well — although it also means money gets where it’s needed faster (and perhaps indicates that the slow, deliberate grantmaking that philanthropists often do isn’t necessary). But the bigger concern, some critics say, is the very source of Scott’s money, and what she owes the public as a result. A rare 2013 Vogue interview described Scott’s mother as someone “who cheerfully stayed home to cook meals and decorate the house” and her father as a “financial planner.”. “She seemed pretty modest about it, like she was happy to have her book treated seriously,” Simonson tells Marker. MacKenzie Scott has given away more than $4 billion over the last four months, including at least $840 million to colleges and universities serving disadvantaged students. MacKenzie and Jeff met in 1992 when they both worked at hedge fund D.E. “For a fairly small organization like ours — we have 15 employees — you become a little suspicious,” he says. Hirshberg has long written about balancing family life and an entrepreneurial venture — and has experienced that firsthand, as the spouse of Stonyfield Farms’ founder Gary Hirshberg. The nonprofit he runs, Point Foundation, offers scholarships and mentoring to LGBTQ students. When Verigin met Scott — who didn’t mention her Amazon connection — in person, she told him she was writing a book about a dam engineer. In 2013, Scott published her second book, Traps. Scott supports equity-focused organizations with low access to philanthropic capital. The gift was stunning in scale and in approach: Scott was making a mark as a new kind of philanthropist. And almost immediately she started working to give the money away, and in a way that could change philanthropy. “I don’t think it occurred to me for a long time that she herself was a writer,” Jorgensen says. “The most important thing she could do is make sure she’s pushing for the kind of structural, systemic changes that would make it impossible for a fortune like hers to arise ever again,” he says. Although Bezos had chosen a subject that was his wife’s passion, his interest was clearly around growing the company. By that year, 2013, the Bezoses were worth around $25 billion, and they had four children, ages seven to twelve. As the spouse, “it takes a lot of self-confidence to be able to understand that you are an important player in your own right, no matter what it is you’re doing, no matter what is your economic contribution.”. The family moved from California to Florida, and although Scott’s father applied to start another investment firm, an administrative judge denied the application. If anything, Scott seemed eager to distance herself from Amazon. With that, Scott far outpaced her ex-husband in the giving realm, and rewrote the typical playbook for high-profile tech philanthropists — who often operate as if they know best not just in business, but in solving societal problems, too. Then, in May 1996, the Wall Street Journal printed a front-page story about Amazon. Together, they received $85 million from Mackenzie Scott, a billionaire philanthropist whose fortune is tied to Amazon. 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