Ex-wife of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos donated one third of US megagift donations last year all on her own

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was responsible for one-third of all U.S. “megagift” donations to charities last year, according to a new report.

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

Scott’s donations 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.

“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.

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.

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

According to Yield Giving’s website, 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.

Yield Giving uses “quiet research” to identify the non-profits “working to advance the opportunities of people in underserved communities,” which includes evaluating the organizations “as privately and anonymously as we can in order to limit burden on non-profits and avoid diverting them from their work,” its website says.

Scott has vowed to continue giving away her fortune “until the safe is empty.”

“We 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’t wait,” she wrote in 2019.

The Independent has contacted Yield Giving for comment.