Jeff Bezos' Ex-Wife Mackenzie Scott Set New Milestone With $1 Billion HBCU Donation: Inside Her Wealth, Net Worth

(MENAFN- Live Mint) Amazon boss Jeff Bezos' ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, one of the biggest names in philanthropy, set a new record of donations earlier this year by gifting over $1 million to Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Fortune reported this week that Scott's $42 million donations to Elizabeth City State University on the school's Founders Day in North Carolina pushed her total giving to HBCUs well past the $1 billion mark.

And that's just part of the billionaire philanthropist's $26 billion philanthropic commitment since 2020, in which she's donated to thousands of organisations focused on DEI, disaster recovery, community development, health, and environmental causes.

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Scott is worth an estimated $37 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Meanwhile, Forbes puts her "real-time net worth" at $32.5 billion.

MacKenzie Scott's total charitable donations through Yield Giving have surpassed $26.3 billion given to non-profit organizations.

Source of Scott's wealth

Her fortune primarily comes from a 4 per cent stake in Amazon, one of the biggest online retailers, which she received during her divorce from founder Jeff Bezos in 2019. The 4 per cent stake in Amazon was worth $36 billion.

Since then, she's reduced her stake by about 42 percent, selling or donating about 58 million shares, worth around $12.6 billion as of late 2025, Fortune reported.

After gaining 400 million Amazon shares following her 2019 divorce from Bezos, Scott now slashed her stake in the $2 trillion tech giant by nearly half.

A regulatory filing with the SEC dated September 30, 2025, showed that Scott held 81.1 million shares - down 58 million from a year earlier, as Bloomberg reported.

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In May 2019, shortly after she announced the terms of the divorce on X (formerly Twitter), she signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away at least half of her wealth over the course of her lifetime.

On a website called Yield Giving, Scott shares details of the $19.3 billion she has given to more than 2,500 nonprofits.

According to Forbes, she employs a "no strings attached" style of giving, wherein the nonprofits to which she donates have full control over how to best deploy the new funds.

MacKenzie Scott donates $26 billion in 5 years

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, accounted for roughly one-third of all major US 'megagift' charitable donations last year, according to a report in June 2026.

Of the $19.2 billion worth of megagifts made by donors in 2025, Scott's giving represented one-third, according to data provided to Fortune from Giving USA and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

Her contributions totalled nearly $7 billion in a single year, bringing her overall giving through her philanthropy initiative, Yield Giving, to more than $26.3 billion across thousands of non-profits.

The latest figures highlight her as one of the most influential philanthropists in the US, alongside other major donors including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Michael Bloomberg.

She has now officially crossed a major milestone by donating more than $1 billion to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

Scott married Bezos in 1993 after they met while working at hedge fund D.E. Shaw. The pair went on to have four children before divorcing in 2019.

The pledge

Following her divorce from Bezos, Scott signed the Giving Pledge in 2019, promising to give away the majority of her net worth. She wrote in the letter, "In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share."

The Giving Pledge“is a promise by the world's wealthiest philanthropists to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetime or wills.”

According to Fortune, Scott has been doling out major gifts since 2020, when she first began directing hundreds of millions of dollars toward HBCUs.

One such gift was to Howard University, the alma mater of former Vice President Kamala Harris, Thurgood Marshall, and Toni Morrison (with whom Scott shares a deep connection).

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She donated $80 million to Howard in November 2025, which was one of the school's largest donations in its 158-year history.

In 2025 alone, Scott donated $70 million each to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the United Negro College Fund.

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