MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has seen her fortune shrink by $3.69 billion so far in 2025, as shares of Amazon.com Inc. have dropped more than 12% year to date.
Scott, 55, remains one of the largest individual shareholders of the Seattle-based tech giant, holding a 1.3% stake in the company.
Amazon, which generated $604 billion in revenue in 2023, has seen its stock price decline sharply this year, falling to $193.06 per share as of May 10, a 12.33% drop since January. That decline has weighed heavily on Scott’s net worth, which Bloomberg now estimates at $36.5 billion, down 9.2% from the start of the year.
- Much of Scott’s wealth is tied to Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Her ownership stake was part of the couple’s 2019 divorce settlement, which granted her 25% of the Amazon shares the couple previously held jointly.
- At the time, she also relinquished her interests in The Washington Post and aerospace company Blue Origin, and gave voting control of her Amazon shares to Bezos.
- Scott, who was one of Amazon’s earliest employees, played a hands-on role in the company’s early days, handling accounting and negotiating the firm’s first shipping contracts.
A graduate of Princeton University, where she studied under novelist Toni Morrison, Scott went on to publish two novels before turning her attention to philanthropy.
Since the divorce, she has emerged as one of the most prolific philanthropists of her generation. Starting in 2020, Scott began distributing her wealth rapidly and with minimal bureaucracy, often without warning.
To date, she has announced more than $14 billion in charitable donations to educational institutions, social justice organizations, and community nonprofits across the United States.
What to know
In financial disclosures, many of these gifts are now listed as liabilities against her net worth, a recognition of how dramatically she has reduced her holdings through philanthropy. These liabilities have been revised downward in recent years to reflect the shrinking size of her Amazon stake.
- Scott’s cash reserves and private assets are less transparent but are believed to include holdings from the original divorce settlement, not related to Amazon. Estimates from Bloomberg incorporate stock dividends, insider transactions, tax implications, and broader market performance.
- Despite her immense giving, Scott remains one of the richest women in the world. She operates through a limited liability company known as Lost Horse.
Scott previously remarried Dan Jewett, a science teacher at the Lakeside School in Seattle. The pair jointly committed to the Giving Pledge in 2021, though public reports in 2023 suggested they had separated.
