Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has revealed her total donations to not-for-profits in 2025 was just over $7.1 billion, a significant increase in her annual giving from recent years.
In an essay on her website, Scott wrote: “This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year.”
In 2024, Scott acknowledged her donations were $2.6 billion, and in 2023 the donations were $2.1 billion.
Since 2019, Scott has now donated around $26.3 billion when factoring in the latest $7.1 billion.
Forbes estimates Scott’s net worth at $33 billion, much of which she acquired through Amazon shares after her 2019 divorce with founder Jeff Bezos, who has an estimated $237 billion fortune.
Last year, Bezos remarried in a controversial wedding ceremony that Forbes estimates cost more than $20 million.
Bezos also has his own donation streams through Bezos Earth Fund, and Forbes has estimated he’s given away $4.1 billion to climate, housing and education causes. However, this comes to just 1.6 per cent of his wealth, meaning he’s given away only a small percentages of wealth in comparison to the top 25 givers in 2025.
MacKenzie Scott’s influence
Scott’s legacy of giving to charities and nonprofits is known for significantly boosting the recipient organisations’ annual budgets without any strings attached.
Many foundations and donors seek updates on the impact of the not-for-profit’s work, but Scott’s donation style has strayed from seeking these reports.
It’s a style that seems to be working, as research released In 2023, from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, into the impact of Scott’s giving, found few of the recipients have struggled to manage the funds or seen funders pullback.
In her latest donation announcement, Scott wrote further about the power of generosity and compassion she believes that community can provide, alongside monetary giving.
Pointing to statistics that show 70 per cent of Americans report giving both labour and money to people they know, and half reported doing the same for strangers, Scott writes that this is “well over a trillion dollars worth of individual humanitarian action that we don’t read about online or hear about on the nightly news.”
To begin to imagine how much more there must be, just consider how many people take time out of their income-producing activities every day to listen with compassion, or to speak up for someone,” she writes, adding that “the multiplier effect on the social value of every one of these forms of benevolent contribution is huge.”
Emphasising the power of giving in any form, Scott sums it up, writing: “There are many ways to influence how we move through the world, and where we land.”