MacKenzie Scott is notoriously generous and notoriously quiet. The billionaire philanthropist, novelist, and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has doled out more than $26 billion to charity during the past few years, but has done so without much fanfare.
Now Scott is going back to her writing roots—she was trained under the acclaimed writer Toni Morrison, after all—and is releasing her new novel, Last Days in Two Nations, chapter by chapter on Substack. Noticeably, she’s opted to publish it on an open platform, and not through a publishing house or distributed by a major bookseller like, say, Amazon.
Scott married Bezos in 1993 before Amazon was officially launched in 1994. She played a critical role in the early days of establishing what is now the No. 1 company on the Fortune Global 500 list, including overseeing early operations, business plans, and contracts. Upon their 2019 divorce, she received roughly a 4% stake in Amazon.
Of course, we may never know whether her intention was to keep her first novel since 2013 off of Amazon, since she never responds to press inquiries and rarely shares her personal thoughts with the masses. (She does, however, sometimes discuss her philanthropic efforts on a blog for her philanthropic organization, Yield Giving). But it’s undeniably interesting that she would opt to publish a book and likely make nothing for it, although she’s got plenty in the bank.
Her current net worth is estimated at more than $38 billion, even though she’s donated more than half of that to charity. But the power of the Amazon shares she received upon her divorce from Bezos is what keeps her net worth and her ability to give high. It’s the classic paradox of how a bull market allows billionaires like Scott to give away tens of billions without getting noticeably poorer. Wealth advisors call this phenomenon “concentrated equity wealth.”
Nearly all of Scott’s fortune is tied up in Amazon stock, and Amazon has been on a historic run. Although Scott reduced her original stake by about 42% by selling or donating some 58 million shares worth around $12.6 billion, the shares she still holds have appreciated faster than she can distribute them. Amazon share prices have jumped nearly 69% in the past five years. Her net worth has only dropped about $2 billion year-to-date, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
MacKenzie Scott’s literary career
While attending Princeton University in the early 1990s, she studied under Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved in 1988, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
Scott has long credited Morrison with shaping her writing and helping her get her footing early in her career. Morrison helped put Scott on a path to publish her first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, which was published in 2005 and received an American Book Award in 2006.
“This writer that I admired so much also turned out to be such a gifted and devoted teacher,” Scott said of Morrison in a 2017 Princeton University interview. “She has given me a real example of a life of passionate devotion to more than one calling.”
Morrison had the same admiration for Scott, having called her“one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes…really one of the best,” according to Vogue.
Scott is releasing her new novel piece by piece, having dropped the title, epigraph, personae, and contents on Saturday, the prologue on Sunday, and the first chapter called “Monday” on Monday. It appears the entire novel will be out by Aug. 31. That being said, it’s difficult to decipher at this point exactly what the novel is about, but the subtitle of the story is called “A History in Eighteen Minds.”
Based on the prologue she posted, the novel appears to center on a fictional religious community called the Church of the Long Tomorrow, whose members she describes as “trapped by beliefs that were not their own.”
“Such a habit to breathe in those words before we have words, and make them thoughts, a thought worm, decomposing us while we are still alive,” the prologue reads.
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