What to Know
Jeff Bezos is not exactly the most popular person on social media, but people are currently praising his ex-wife (and saying that she was clearly “too good for him.”) MacKenzie Scott, 55, and Jeff, 61, got divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage. MacKenzie received 25% of their shared Amazon stake in the divorce settlement (about $36 billion). After their split, she vowed to give away a large portion of her wealth, and since then, she has donated $26.3 billion. On Tuesday, December 9, she announced that she donated about $7.2 billion this year alone.
She has donated to numerous colleges and nonprofit organizations.
According to the New York Times, MacKenzie’s largest donation of $90 million went to an organization called Forests, People, Climate, which works to protect tropical forests. She also gave $70 million to several different scholarship funds: the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, and the United Negro College Fund.
Though she donated to lots of different nonprofits, she seemed to prioritize colleges and universities this year, including community colleges.
She’s been known to make unrestricted donations.
This means that when she gives large sums of money to various organizations, she’s not telling them what the money should be spent on. In her December 9 blog post, she mentioned how news organizations would probably focus on the amount of money she donated this year, but there’s so much giving that is never reported in the news.
“This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year,” she wrote. She mentioned that in 2020, $471 billion was donated to charities in the United States, but that’s not the only type of giving that occurs.
MacKenzie Scott (Jeff Bezoz’s ex-wife & original partner/investor) continues to show the billionaire men what to do to actually help ppl with their $$. https://t.co/oqot0YEMTp
— Reagan Gomez (@ReaganGomez) October 28, 2025
“There was also $68 billion in reported financial support sent to family members living in other countries, tens of billions in crowdfunding, $200 billion in volunteer labor at service organizations, and nearly $700 billion in wages for the paid employees who chose to take jobs delivering those services over jobs where they might have earned more,” she wrote.
Additionally, she mentioned how 70% of Americans say they’ve given “labor and money” to people they know. “That’s well over a trillion dollars worth of individual humanitarian action that we don’t read about online or hear about on the nightly news,” she continued. “To begin to imagine how much more there must be, just consider how many people take time out of their income-producing activities every day to listen with compassion, or to speak up for someone.”
People on social media praised her for it.
— MacKenzie Scott (@mackenziescott) April 4, 2019
Lots of them argued that MacKenzie is an example of what billionaires could (and should) do with their money.
“Imagine the world if every billionaire done something like this,” one person on Reddit wrote. “To them, it’s literally just numbers on a screen. To the people it helps, it’s so much more.” Another person added, “This woman is amazing – for real. Exactly what rich people should be doing with their money: use it for good.”
And unsurprisingly, some people compared MacKenzie to her ex, whom some accused of “hoarding wealth” and spending millions on his controversial wedding this year. “She’s a much better person than her ex-husband,” one person concluded.
