{"id":762190,"date":"2026-06-26T09:54:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T09:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/762190\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T09:54:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T09:54:19","slug":"ex-wife-of-amazon-boss-jeff-bezos-donated-one-third-of-us-megagift-donations-last-year-all-on-her-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/762190\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-wife of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos donated one third of US megagift donations last year all on her own"},"content":{"rendered":"

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MacKenzie Scott<\/a>, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos<\/a>, was responsible for one-third of all U.S. \u201cmegagift\u201d donations to charities last year, according to a new report.<\/p>\n

Last year, the total amount of megagifts to charity \u2014 defined as donations that surpass 0.1 percent of total giving in a year \u2014 added up to $19.2 billion, according to a new Fortune<\/a> report, which cites data from Giving USA and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. <\/p>\n

Scott\u2019s donations<\/a> made up about one-third of that figure, with nearly $7 billion in megagifts, bringing her five-year total to $26.2 billion, the report said. Other top megagift donors included former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.<\/p>\n

“It was a positive year for charitable giving, with virtually all categories of recipient organizations achieving solid or better growth at the aggregate level,” Giving USA Foundation Vice Chair Gabe Cooper told Fortune. <\/p>\n

\"MacKenzieMacKenzie Scott, was responsible for nearly one-third of all \u2018megagift\u2019 donations to charity last year, according to a new report (Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Bezos married Scott in 1993, a year before he founded Amazon in their Bellevue, Washington, garage. The pair met while working at D.E. Shaw, a New York hedge fund. The couple had three sons and a daughter together before they split in 2019. <\/p>\n

Scott, now 56, has since founded the charity Yield Giving, which has donated more than $26 billion to 2,700 non-profits.<\/p>\n

According to Yield Giving\u2019s website<\/a>, its top donations in 2025 included $60 million for Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice, a group that supports clean energy initiatives; $63 million for Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C.; and $90 million for Forests, People, Climate, an anti-deforestation non-profit.<\/p>\n

\"AmazonAmazon boss Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott divorced in 2019, after 26 years of marriage (dpa\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Yield Giving uses \u201cquiet research\u201d to identify the non-profits \u201cworking to advance the opportunities of people in underserved communities,\u201d which includes evaluating the organizations \u201cas privately and anonymously as we can in order to limit burden on non-profits and avoid diverting them from their work,\u201d its website <\/a>says.<\/p>\n

Scott has vowed to continue giving away her fortune \u201cuntil the safe is empty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe each come by the gifts we have to offer by an infinite series of influences and lucky breaks we can never fully understand. In addition to whatever assets life has nurtured in me, I have a disproportionate amount of money to share. My approach to philanthropy will continue to be thoughtful. It will take time and effort and care. But I won\u2019t wait,\u201d she wrote<\/a> in 2019. <\/p>\n

The Independent has contacted Yield Giving for comment. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":762191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48],"class_list":["post-762190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}