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By Max Towey
In 2019, Jeff Bezos posted on Twitter to announce his divorce from MacKenzie Scott Bezos, his wife of 26 years:
We’ve had such a great life together as a married couple, and we also see wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures. Though the labels might be different, we remain a family, and we remain cherished friends.
Prior to that, little attention was paid to MacKenzie Scott. Occasionally, he’d speak about her to the press, like in this Vogue interview from 2013: “I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot, but I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her, so I knew exactly what her SATs were.”
Scott, an introverted novelist, preferred to remain out of the spotlight, but news of their divorce made national headlines – especially when the National Enquirer published erotic texts between Jeff Bezos and his now-wife Lauren Sánchez. “I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon,” Bezos wrote in one. “I want to breathe you in,” he wrote in another. Few knew about Lauren Sánchez at the time, though pictures of the buxom journalist – and her romance with Bezos – would soon go viral.
Bezos and Sánchez met at a 2016 party celebrating the Amazon-distributed film Manchester by the Sea. Her husband at the time, Patrick Whitesell, introduced them. At this party, Bezos reportedly whispered to her, “You can’t fight chemistry!” A years-long affair commenced shortly thereafter, culminating with the bombshell report from the Enquirer.
Since that party, it’s safe to say that Jeff and MacKenzie have gone in different directions. This summer, Jeff got married in a Venice wedding that would’ve made Marie Antoinette blush. Sydney Sweeney, Tom Brady, Kim Kardashian, and his other new A-list friends all made the trip. He and Lauren Sánchez have become Hollywood royalty, partying in space with Katy Perry and showcasing their sculpted bodies on their megayacht for the paparazzi buoying in the Mediterranean. It’s hard to imagine he was once the balding, bookish nerd pitching Amazon.com in a rundown Seattle office.
On the other hand, MacKenzie Scott – who dropped the name Bezos with remarkable swiftness – has led a private life while building a philanthropic machine that makes George Soros look like a piker. Last week, she announced she was giving $700M to HBCUs; since 2020, she’s given away over $19B to philanthropic causes, most of them to DEI-related or education-related causes. For context, the Hungarian-American financier George Soros – one of the most prolific givers in history – has donated $32B in his entire lifetime.
So who is MacKenzie Scott? Where is her money going? And what’s her vision for the world?
These are the questions today’s deep-dive seeks to answer.
MacKenzie Scott was born on April 7, 1970, in San Francisco, California, to Holiday Robin, a homemaker, and Jason Baker Tuttle, a “financial planner,” as she stated in a 2013 Vogue interview. She might’ve been underselling it a bit: He ran an investment firm, and the family had a house in both California’s affluent Marin County and San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood. She grew up with two brothers and was named after her grandfather, who worked as general counsel at El Paso Natural Gas.
From a young age, Scott showed a passion for writing; at just six years old, she authored a 142-page book called The Book Worm, though it was unfortunately lost in a flood. In an addendum to her first novel, she recalled her next writing era as a kid: “I hopped on my Schwinn and rode to the library to hunt down a botanical encyclopedia, and for the next year, all my stories were stuffed with extraneous mentions of trees and flowers.”
After attending the prestigious Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut (current tuition of $77,000 a year), she pursued higher education at Princeton. Before graduating from Hotchkiss, however, her family’s fortune vanished: Following an SEC investigation, her parents and her parents’ firm declared bankruptcy. “[Tuttle’s] lavish spending was the reason the firm was unable to refund much of the funds it owed to clients,” the judge wrote of her dad. He was then barred from advising on investments, and her mom took a job at a clothing store in Palm Beach.
At Princeton, she “worked a variety of jobs to put [herself] through school.” She earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1992, studying under Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, who later described her as one of the best students in her creative writing classes. After graduating from Princeton, Scott worked as a research assistant to Toni Morrison on her 1992 novel Jazz.
Struggling to make her way as a writer, she took an administrative job at the hedge fund D.E. Shaw & Co. in New York City, where she got an office next to a guy with a “giant laugh.” Her connection with Jeff Bezos was immediate; after dating for just three months, they married in 1993. She later admitted that she “pursued” Jeff Bezos. The following year, the couple moved to Seattle, where her new husband announced his plan for a company that would sell books online: Amazon.com.
As one of the company's earliest employees, she contributed to creating its name, drafting the business plan, managing accounts, shipping early orders, and even negotiating Amazon's first freight contract. MacKenzie and Jeff launched the company in their garage, and she worked as the company’s bookkeeper and administrator. By 1996, however, she stepped back from day-to-day involvement to focus on her writing aspirations and starting a family.
Scott and Bezos welcomed their first child, a son, in 2000, followed by two more sons and an adopted daughter from China, forming a family of six. Amid raising her children and supporting Amazon's growth, Scott pursued her literary dreams. With an introduction from Toni Morrison to literary agent Amanda “Binky” Urban, she published her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, in 2005.
The book won an American Book Award in 2006 and was praised by Morrison as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart,” but sold just ~2,000 copies and got a mediocre review from the NYT. Her second novel, Traps, followed in 2013. It received more acclaim but also struggled to sell.
While MacKenzie struggled to sell, Jeff did not: Throughout the 2010s, Amazon’s market cap grew from around $50B to $1T, making the Bezoses one of the richest couples on Earth. In this period, other differences emerged between MacKenzie and Jeff: As she told Vogue in 2013, “Jeff is the opposite of me. He likes to meet people. He’s a very social guy. Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking.”
Among the people he met was Lauren Sánchez, leading Scott and Bezos to announce their divorce in January 2019. Under Washington State divorce laws, Scott received approximately 4% of Amazon's stock – about 19.7M shares valued at $35.6B at the time – making her one of the wealthiest women in the world. Bezos retained 75% of their shared Amazon stock and voting control over her shares.
Post-divorce, MacKenzie Bezos reverted to MacKenzie Scott and quickly pivoted toward philanthropy. She also had a brief 18-month marriage to Dan Jewett, a science teacher at the prestigious school her children attended.
In May 2019, a month after finalizing her divorce from Bezos, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, committing to give away the majority of her wealth during her lifetime. In a July 2020 blog post, she wrote:
Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror. Life will never stop finding fresh ways to expose inequities in our systems; or waking us up to the fact that a civilization this imbalanced is not only unjust, but also unstable. What fills me with hope is the thought of what will come if each of us reflects on what we can offer. Opportunities that flowed from the mere chance of skin color, sexual orientation, gender, or zip code may have yielded resources that can be powerful levers for change. People troubled by recent events can make new connections between privileges they’ve enjoyed and benefits they’ve taken for granted. From there, many will choose to share some of what they have with people whose equal participation is essential to the construction of a better world.
The first $1.7B she gave away in 2020 went to the following causes:
Racial Equity: $586.7M
LGBTQ+ Equity: $46M
Gender Equity: $133M
Economic Mobility: $399.5M
Empathy & Bridging Divides: $55M
Functional Democracy: $72M
Public Health: $128.3M
Global Development: $130M
Climate Change: $125M
She also highlighted:
On this list, 91% of the racial equity organizations are run by leaders of color, 100% of the LGBTQ+ equity organizations are run by LGBTQ+ leaders, and 83% of the gender equity organizations are run by women, bringing lived experience to solutions for imbalanced social systems.
In 2020, Scott donated $5.8B total, with $4.15B going to organizations aiding Covid recovery. By mid-2021, her total reached $8.5B across 780 organizations. In recent years, she’s made HBCUs a philanthropic priority: This year alone, she’s donated over $700M to HBCUs, with 15 colleges receiving $19M or more. Overall, she has donated over $1B to HBCUs between 2020 and 2025.
As of late 2024, her cumulative donations exceeded $19.3B to more than 1,600 organizations, and her pace of giving shows no signs of slowing down. This hasn’t made her popular with everyone. Elon Musk has accused her of “destroying” civilization and called her donations “concerning.” He also believes her giving may be out of spite: “It’s safe to say that MacKenzie [ahem] Scott is not exactly a big fan of her ex-husband. Unfortunately, a lot of others are getting caught in the crossfire.”
Scott has thus rapidly emerged as one of the world’s biggest and most influential givers. Whether she’s destroying or saving civilization – or perhaps something in between – is for you to decide.
Editor’s Note
Billionaires spending billions on their social priorities: Is that a good thing, or does it just magnify inequality and distort their power? Let us know by replying to this email.
Tons of you wrote in yesterday in response to our article on the changes to the hepatitis B vaccine recommendation. We wish we could run more of these, but here are a handful of emails we received:
Meghan wrote:
As a pediatrician, infectious disease specialist, and mom of 2 vaccinated children, and a baby born in the 80s who unknowingly contracted hepatitis b from my mom or a caregiver, I’m very upset about this change. I’ve seen a large decline in vaccination from families or parents wanting alternate schedules. Parents have always had a choice to decline vaccine for their children but what this change does is increase confusion and doubt about vaccine safety that has been proven by literally billions of children receiving it. I’ve never seen a kid have a reaction to hepatitis b vaccine and would argue it is probably one of the safest on the market. What I have seen is chronic hepatitis b, liver failure and liver transplantation which I wouldn’t wish anyone to endure if easily preventable. Public health is about keeping populations healthy no matter income level, race, etc.. healthcare policy and insurance coverage is not made on an individual basis. This ACIP group is trying to make policy based on individual experiences and is against what we’ve learned over decades about how population health works.
Melissa said:
I do believe the covid shot opened many people's eyes to the lack of vaccine studies and the efficacy of something that was touted to stop transmission when it, in fact, did not. Parents started researching for themselves and found that many, if not all childhood vaccines, are only effective for a short period of time, so they started asking themselves, "Does the risk outweigh the reward?" Some parents landed on yes and others no. As for the Hep B vaccine, if a mother is screened, which my OBGYN did two STI screenings during my last pregnancy, and tests negative both times, why does a baby less than 24 hours old need this medical intervention?
What this comes down to is informed consent and allowing parents to make that decision for their children. There are consequences to vaccination and no vaccination, and it should be up to the parents to decide for their child which consequences they're willing to live with. Critics on both sides of the debate need to realize that each parent is doing what they believe is best and not shame the other side for trying to do so.
I've talked to parents with children severely injured by vaccines, even one whose 2 year old son died within 24 hours after their well-visit where they received all recquired vaccinations, and parents who believe it's the public's responsibility to vaccinate because their baby can't receive vaccinations. There are challenges on both sides, so whose job is it to decide which babies suffer the consequences of either decision? The answer: the baby's parents.
Grayson from Washington said:
I am a soon to be father (and day now!), and my wife and I have been doing a lot of research into vaccines. Some make total sense to us, such as the hep-b (at least based on information we were anle to find). Some make no sense such as the eye goop that prevents gonorrhea, which they can only get if the mom has gonorrhea, and they test mom multiple times. However, the biggest frustration for me, is that we are in the position of having to do our own research. Why can we not trust our health providers and government to give ethical and trustworthy information and recommendations on these vaccines? Some are blatant money grabs, and others are for the common good. Ideally, we would be able to just trust what the professionals say, buts that not how it is. I don't love the idea of pulling back all vaccine recommendations simply because RFK doesn't like vaccines, but I agree that we need to take a long look at the system we have and review it.
Rita from Washington state wrote:
The other countries referenced that no longer vaccinate all babies at birth for Hepatitis B have universal healthcare. Access is less of an issue. Until we can guarantee those babies will be getting follow up care and women can get the prenatal and regular care they need, safety nets should remain.
And Jackie from OH said:
The news about the Hep B vaccine is deeply troubling. For context, I’m a pediatric hospitalist who also works in the newborn nursery. What boggles my mind is that RFK and the advisory board keep framing Hep B as an “STD” or a disease transmitted “through needles,” yet they’ve changed the recommendation to start the vaccine at 2 months. If they truly believed Hep B was limited to those transmission routes, why wouldn’t the recommendation be to start at 12 years? The answer is that they KNOW there are other ways newborns can contract Hep B and, as you mentioned in your deep dive, infants are actually MORE likely to contract it and suffer severe, lifelong consequences than adults.
They’re basing this change on no new science or evidence, just vibes and fear‑mongering. And practically, this will only make it harder for insurance companies to provide coverage for families who want their newborn to get the Hep B vaccine. I constantly have families decline it, and while I always explain the risks so they can make an informed decision, they are never required to get it before they leave the hospital. This change is just going to create more problems than it solves. I’m genuinely worried.
By the way, I love what you all do with these deep dives. You’ve truly changed my perspective on so many issues, and for that I’m grateful!
Thanks for reading. If you’ve made it this far and still want more, check out our past five articles below:
See you tomorrow.
—Max and Max
