Despite wanting to keep her gigantic philanthropy quiet, MacKenzie Scott’s giving keeps making a splash.
Of the $19.2 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. Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had her banner philanthropic year in 2025, when she donated about $7 billion, which brought her cumulative giving to $26.2 billion in just five years across thousands of organizations focused on housing, DEI, disaster recovery, and many more causes.
Other 2025 megadonors included Michael Bloomberg ($4.3 billion), Bill Gates ($3.7 billion), Warren Buffett ($1.34 billion), and Susan and Michael Dell (nearly $1 billion). These megadonors are part of the larger philanthropic engine in the U.S., which totaled a whopping $617.2 billion in 2025, according to a report published by Giving USA and IU’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy released Tuesday. This included philanthropic donations from individuals, bequests, foundations, and corporations to U.S. charities. The total is a 5.7% jump from the previous year.
“It was a positive year for charitable giving, with virtually all categories of recipient organizations achieving solid or better growth at the aggregate level,” Gabe Cooper, vice chair of Giving USA Foundation and founder and CEO of Virtuous, said in a statement. Some of the organization types that received the most funding include religion, human services, education, health, international affairs, and arts and culture.
Despite Scott’s extreme generosity in 2025, the Chronicle of Philanthropy didn’t recognize heron its list of the top 50 donors this year. That’s due mostly to Scott’s quiet nature of giving. She is notoriously under-the-radar with her donations, never personally seeking press coverage for her gifts and rarely offering insights into the donations.
“MacKenzie Scott is among the notable absences on the Philanthropy 50 list,” according to the Chronicle. “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.”
But Scott doesn’t really participate in philanthropy for the recognition, and maybe that’s the point. Much of her giving was inspired by kind acts from her past, like her college roommate giving her $1,000 so she wouldn’t have to drop out and her dentist providing her free dental work when he knew she couldn’t afford it.
“It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible,” Scott wrote in the Dec. 9 essay. “The potential of peaceful, non-transactional contribution has long been underestimated, often on the basis that it is not financially self-sustaining, or that some of its benefits are hard to track. But what if these imagined liabilities are actually assets?”
Plus, giving just feels good, 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,” she wrote.
Following her divorce from Bezos (who has donated far less of his net worth than Scott over his lifetime), Scott signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give away the majority of her net worth. She’s steadily chipped away at that, but due to the power of Amazon shares she received upon her divorce, her net worth still sits at nearly $35 billion.
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