"Ever notice MacKenzie Scott donates billions a year but never runs out of cash? Here's how."
The injections of cash, which arrive without warning, have led to bolstered finances, scholarships, jobs—and sometimes even more
It started with a cryptic email containing the word “confidential” in the subject line.
A brief phone call later, Angelique Albert sat stunned by the knowledge that Native Forward, the grassroots nonprofit she runs to fund scholarships for Native American students, had just received an unsolicited $20 million grant from MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos.
The Albuquerque, N.M., nonprofit used the 2020 gift to create new scholarship programs and expand advising services for students. It moved out of a cramped, rented office and bought a 10,500-square-foot, two-story building as its headquarters. It hired a consulting firm to help develop its strategy.
Last August, an email with a different address popped into Albert’s inbox asking if she might have 15 minutes to chat. This time, the gift amounted to $50 million. “Fifteen million?” Albert recalled asking, scribbling notes to herself so she would know she had heard correctly. “Fifty million, 5-0,” came the reply.
Since 2019, MacKenzie Scott has given away more than $26 billion, making her one of the most generous philanthropists alive. The $7.17 billion in giving she disclosed for the roughly one-year period ended in December 2025 represented her largest single slug yet, with more money going to new grantees than to prior recipients for the first time, according to philanthropy adviser Panorama Global, which has analyzed Scott’s giving.
Scott has described her strategy as focusing on “undersupported causes and people” of all kinds. Her priorities include equity, education, economic security and the environment.
More wealth than ever is being created among the ultrawealthy, and the amount of money they are giving to charitable causes has ticked up in recent years. But their annual giving rate has stayed relatively steady at about 1.2% of their net worth, according to philanthropy advisory firm Bridgespan Group, which has worked with Scott.
Scott’s philanthropy is on a different order of magnitude, and life on the receiving end of it can be head-spinning.
Native Forward used the new gift to set up a $40 million endowment. It projects it will fund more than 2,000 student awards this academic year, up from about 800 the year before it received its first gift from Scott. “To have access to capital, it really opens the doors,” Albert said.
UNCF, formerly United Negro College Fund, has received two gifts from Scott, totaling $80 million. Chief Executive Michael L. Lomax said he has seen the rise over the past two decades of a more data-driven, return-on-investment approach to philanthropy. “You understand this is going to be a negotiation, that the donors have expectations and you have to meet those expectations,” he said, referring to his more commonplace interactions with philanthropists.
“And then you have somebody like MacKenzie Scott saying, we’re in this together, we trust you and we trust your judgment,” he said. “She’s rewriting American philanthropy.”
Scott’s website, yieldgiving.com, periodically updates with essays by Scott but says the team doesn’t engage with media so attention can focus on the nonprofits. Lost Horse LLC, Scott’s family office, has an even lower profile, with no website or obvious avenue of contact. Scott has written that her giving team’s efforts are driven by the belief that “it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands.”
Attempts to reach Scott directly and through intermediaries weren’t successful.
Amazon’s soaring stock price in recent years has complicated her pledge to give all of her money away. Scott’s Amazon stake was valued at around $40.4 billion at the end of 2024, compared with about $36 billion at the end of 2019, despite her more than halving her stake in the interim to expand her philanthropic efforts. The value of her stake dropped to $18.7 billion at the end of 2025.
Some conservative critics, like the think tank Capital Research Center, have criticized Scott’s philanthropy as far-left, highlighting Scott’s funding of nonprofits including the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and groups working for racial and gender equity. A deleted tweet from billionaire Elon Musk in 2024 suggested her giving was “among ‘Reasons that Western Civilization died.’”
But it has drawn praise from some unlikely corners too.
“What I appreciate is the fact that she’s willing to part with a lot of it,” said Lawson Bader, chief executive of DonorsTrust, a public foundation that works with conservative- and libertarian-minded donors, noting that ultrawealthy donors often feel daunted when it comes to giving at scale. “Now, I’m not sure I’d necessarily agree with where it’s all going, but she at least is trying.”
The gifts routinely shock recipients. There is no application process, save for one open call for a round of gifts awarded in 2024. There is no public list of employees or advisers to which to lob an appeal.
Chicago-based Hire360, which connects low-income communities with unionized construction careers, received $3 million from Scott in 2023, one of the biggest gifts in its history. Executive Director Jay Rowell said he still doesn’t know how it wound up on the radar of Scott and her team.
“I’m not a big crier, but I just lost it,” Rowell said of the moment he learned of the gift, calling it a validation of his and his team’s work. The windfall helped complete the construction of a 40,000-square-foot training center, which has helped Hire360 expand statewide and train more people. It also let other donors’ gifts fund training programs and the purchase of boots and tools that trainees can’t afford.
Heidi M. Anderson, president of the historically black university the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, ignored several emails in 2020 from a sender—“something with a horse,” she said—asking for a brief conversation with her, and only her. “I was like, I have no idea what it is; it goes in the trash.”
She eventually asked her vice president of advancement to follow up. When she took a call at his urging, Anderson learned Scott was giving the school $20 million. “It took my breath away,” Anderson said. (A $38 million gift would follow in 2025.) Anderson said she was about to launch into an excited spiel about UMES’s students, many the first in their families to go to college, but was surprised to hear that the team already knew all about the school.
UMES used some of Scott’s first gift to ready the campus for Covid learning and to commission studies on how it should evolve. The school is using the most recent gift to bolster its endowment, now $91 million after the infusion, and is on track to open the first veterinary medical school in the state.
Scott once described how she and her team decided on 384 grant recipients. After seeking suggestions from “hundreds of field experts, funders and nonprofit leaders and volunteers” came phone interviews, analyses of outcomes and a deeper dive into 822 of the 6,490 organizations they started with. Native Forward initially was asked to provide some information for an anonymous prospective donor and heard back months later with news of the 2020 award.
“Because our research is data-driven and rigorous, our giving process can be human and soft,” Scott wrote in the essay.
In another, she wrote of unexpected acts of generosity that animated her giving: the dentist who offered her free dental work in college when he saw her using denture glue on a broken tooth; the roommate who lent her $1,000, saving her from dropping out of college.
“None of us has any idea” how generous acts will reverberate, she wrote.
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Appeared in the March 9, 2026, print edition as 'How MacKenzie Scott Donates Billions'.
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