The previous year, MacKenzie Scott reduced the amount of Amazon stock she owned.
According to a regulatory document that Bloomberg was able to get, the philanthropist, author, and former wife of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is 53 years old, sold 65.3 million shares of Amazon.com Inc. in the year 2023.
Based on the information provided by the publication, the unloaded shares are equivalent to around one quarter of her investment in the technology giant and were valued at $10.4 billion as of Friday.
Following her divorce from Bezos, who is 60 years old, in 2019, after 25 years of marriage, Scott ended up with around a 4% share in Amazon worth $38.3 billion. This placed her 22nd on the list of the world’s 500 wealthiest individuals, according to a study that was published by Bloomberg at the time.
As a result of the substantial compensation, she became the richest woman in the world at that particular moment.
Since then, Scott has reduced her stake in Amazon by around fifty percent over the course of the previous five years; yet, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, the online retailer continues to constitute the majority of her net worth of thirty-seven billion dollars.
In addition, she became a member of the Giving Pledge in 2019, which is a group of billionaires who have signed a commitment to give half of their money. Since then, she has contributed more than $16.5 billion to a broad variety of charitable organizations.
“I have no doubt that tremendous value comes when people act quickly on the impulse to give,” the philanthropist said in a letter that was posted on the website of the project. She went on to expound on her choice to accept the pledge. Among all the motivations, the desire to be of service is the one that generates the most beneficial ripple effects.
To this day, I will continue to pursue charity with a careful approach. It will need time, effort, and careful attention. However, I will not wait,” she continued. “And I will continue to do this until the safe is completely empty.”
In a blog post published on Medium in July 2020, about one year after she made the commitment, Scott revealed that she had donated roughly $1.7 billion to a number of charitable organizations. These organizations included Asian Americans Advancing Justice — AAJC, Black Girls CODE, Educate Girls, LatinoJustice, and Transgender Law Center’s organizations.
Later that year, she disclosed in another blog post that she and a “team of advisors” had distributed more than $4 billion to organizations that were helping communities in the United States that were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of these organizations were able to fulfill “basic needs,” while others were able to address “long-term systemic inequities that have been deepened by the crisis.”
During the summer that followed, she and her husband at the time, Dan Jewett, made a donation of $2.7 billion to “286 high-impact organizations in categories and communities that have been historically underfunded and overlooked,” as she stated in a blog post that she wrote at the time.
Organizations like as colleges, arts and cultural organizations, refugee settlement groups, police reform initiatives, LGBTQ+ organizations that emphasize leaders of color, and groups that concentrate on empowering women and girls were among the organizations that she shared.
Recently, in February and March of 2022, Scott made a donation of $133.5 million to Communities in educational, an organization that assists in funding educational programs for kids who are considered to be at risk, and a donation of $436 million to Habitat for Humanity.