Kamal Ghorui
MacKenzie Scott donated $26 billion over the past seven years, including a record $7.2 billion in 2025, a pace of giving that makes her the third-largest philanthropist of all time by total lifetime donations, according to Forbes. Scott is a novelist and the former spouse of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She has distributed the funds primarily through large, unrestricted grants to non-profit organisations across the United States and internationally. Her total giving since 2019 now stands at $26 billion, according to publicly disclosed figures compiled by philanthropy trackers and financial publications.The $7.2 billion she gave in 2025 marks the largest single-year amount of her philanthropic career. The record year accelerated her overall total and pushed her ahead of most living donors in cumulative lifetime contributions.With $26 billion in lifetime giving, Scott ranks as the third-biggest philanthropist of all time in absolute dollars donated. Only two individuals in modern history have given more in total lifetime contributions.Her 2025 giving alone exceeded the combined lifetime donations of several prominent billionaires, including Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk, Google co-founder Larry Page, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and her former husband Jeff Bezos.Scott’s philanthropic strategy has differed from many large-scale donors. Rather than establishing a traditional foundation with extensive application processes, she has relied on advisory teams to identify organisations and has provided grants with few restrictions on how the money must be used. Recipients have included charities focused on education, racial equity, public health, housing, food security and community development.Since announcing her intention in 2019 to give away the majority of her wealth, Scott has moved at an unusually rapid pace compared with other billionaires. The $26 billion total represents one of the fastest large-scale philanthropic distributions in modern history.Most of her wealth comes from her divorce settlement with Jeff Bezos in 2019, when she received a stake in Amazon. She has since sold portions of those shares to fund her charitable donations.The comparison is based on the total amounts Musk, Page, Ellison and Bezos have publicly donated over their lifetimes. Although they have promised large sums and set up charity foundations, the money they have actually given so far is still less than what Scott donated in 2025 alone.Scott has not publicly indicated a fixed end date for her giving. However, her pace over the past seven years suggests she intends to continue distributing large portions of her wealth.
