Before MacKenzie Scott signed the Giving Pledge and started on her path to give away her $36 billion net worth, she went looking for a paragraph in a book she’d marked up during her college years.
Scott signed the Giving Pledge on May 25, 2019, just months after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos left her with a roughly 4% stake in the company. But the billionaire philanthropist and author didn’t open her letter with talk of foundations or tax strategy. Instead, she leaned into her roots as a writer drawing a connection between literature and philanthropy.
She opened her Giving Pledge letter with a memory of pulling Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life off a shelf of her old college books, where she found a passage that she had “underlined and starred.” Dillard’s advice to writers was to not hoard your best material for some later chapter.
“The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now,” Dillard wrote, warning that otherwise, “you open your safe and find ashes.” Scott took the writing advice literally and applied it to her massive fortune.
MacKenzie Scott’s $26 billion philanthropic playbook
For the past six years, Scott has remained committed to emptying her safe, so to speak. She’s donated more than $26 billion across more than 2,700 gifts through her philanthropic organization, Yield Giving. Her marquee year was in 2025 when she donated an eye-popping $7.2 billion. (That’s more than Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, have given over their entire lifetimes, according to Forbes estimates). The publication also named Scott the third-most generous philanthropist in the world this year, noting she has given away 46% of her net worth.
True to the Dillard ethos, she gives fast and lets go. Her philanthropic style is stroking unrestricted checks with no applications, no progress reports, and almost no press.
“She practices trust-based philanthropy,” Bob Woodruff Foundation CEO Anne Marie Dougherty previously told Fortune.
Scott drawing inspiration from literature isn’t incidental: She is a novelist herself. Her 2005 debut, The Testing of Luther Albright, won an American Book Award. She was trained at Princeton Univeristy, where she studied English and creative writing under Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Morrison, who served as Scott’s senior thesis advisor. Morrison even later called Scott “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes.” Scott also worked as a research assistant for Morrison while the author was writing her 1992 novel Jazz.
After Scott’s graduation from Princeton, a recommendation from Morrison also helped Scott land a job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw (which is where she ultimately met Bezos). Morrison later introduced Scott to her own literary agent, Amanda Urban, and wrote an opening blurb in Scott’s first novel.
Scott has, in turn, written her mentor into her philanthropic efforts. Her giving to historically Black colleges and universities surpassed $1 billion this year, and a $3 million donation to Howard University funded the creation of the Toni Morrison Endowed Chair in Arts and Humanities, announced in 2022. It served as an homage to the professor who died in 2019, the same year Scott signed the Giving Pledge pledge.
Scott is still a long ways away from fully emptying her safe. Due to Amazon’s stock performance, Scott’s net worth still hovers above $36 billion despite the more than $26 billion she’s given away. But Scott’s letter suggests she’s playing a longer game.
“My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care,” Scott wrote in her Giving Pledge letter. “But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”
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