When Jeff Bezos divorced Mackenzie Scott, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world. Since then, she has tried extremely hard to shed that label, and many charities around the country could look at their bank accounts and see a lot more commas and zeroes because of her handouts. But unlike her ex-husband, she doesn’t seem to enjoy seeing her name in the media, and she’s now decided to hand out billions of dollars as secretly and privately as possible.
It’s now up to the individual charity to decide if they want the word out. So far, in 2023, 17 nonprofits have announced they received significant donations through Scott through her Yield Giving fund. The total amount of those handouts is $97 million, and the average amount given was $1 million to $15 million.
If you are scoring at home, that adds up to over $14.1 billion given out to over 1,600 charities since 2020. What would be really interesting to learn is what those charities did with the money, what percentage of it went to their core mission, and how much executives wasted. For now, the story is the sheer volume of handouts and the amount of money poured into nonprofits.
The National Housing Trust received $10 million from Scott in July. Sean McCarty is the donor relations manager, and he said he decided he wanted to publicize the big gift.
“It was in our best interest to announce this donation and to share the victory with our peers in the movement. We view this gift as a vote of confidence.”
Trust officials seemed to agonize over how to publicly handle their new fortune. On one side, they felt Scott handing over a big check meant they hit a certain level of trust and faith from Scott that they could handle a chunk of money they never dreamed they’d have. On the other side, they wanted to take in more than $10 million and didn’t want other donors to think Trust was flush with cash and not open their checkbooks.
“The reality is that this is a very large problem that we’re trying to solve. There’s a shortage of over 7 million affordable homes here in the United States alone, and so when we decided to publish this, we wanted to ensure that we weren’t sharing that we now have all the resources we need to pursue our mission. We’re still in need of support from a variety of sources.”
Scott’s net worth is still registering in the stratosphere at $36.1 billion, thanks to the performance of Amazon.
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