With the year 2020 coming to an end, we would like to end this year with a high note.

A woman donated 6 billion in a single year.

Donations went to various charity organisations from historically Black colleges to a crisis text line — all with very few strings attached.

As the New York Times wrote, “They came like gifts from a Secret Santa, $20 million here, $40 million there, all to higher education, but not to the elite universities that usually hog all the attention. These donations went to colleges and universities that many people have never heard of, and that tended to serve regional, minority, and lower-income students.”

She and her team had identified as serving “communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital.” Experts said the donation might be the most ever given directly to charities in a single year by a living donor.

She is MacKenzie Scott. One of the wealthiest woman billionaires. MacKenzie was the former wife of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Not many things are known about MacKenzie Scott as she always remain a low profile

#1: She Was In Amazon Since The Beginning

Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott met in 1992 in New York. They married a year later. In 1994, both of them quit their job and moved to Seattle to start Amazon. At that time, the vision was an online bookseller. MacKenzie was the one negotiated Amazon's first freight contracts. 

#2: Her Divorce With Jeff Bezos

She and Jeff Bezos separated peacefully even though Jeff Bezos had an affair. Jeff Bezos tweeted that "if we had known we would separate after 25 years, we would do it all again."

Bezos transferred 25% of his Amazon stock holdings to MacKenzie. At that time, her net worth is USD36 billion. According to Forbes, due to the increased demand for e-commerce during Covid-19, her net worth increases to USD58 billion. 

#3: She Was Born In A Wealthy Family

MacKenzie grew up on a sprawling mansion in San Francisco to a financial planner father and a stay-at-home philanthropist mother. Her father, Jason Baker Tuttle, ran a San Francisco investment firm. In the 1970s, MacKenzie's mother chaired a fundraising group that organised a nine-course dinner to raise money for the Fine Art Museum in San Francisco. But as she finishes her junior high, her family's financial security crumbled.

#4: MacKenzie Is Smart And Talented

She attended Hotchkiss, an elite boarding school. After that, we went to Princeton. According to an interview of alumni of Hotchkiss, remembers that she was hardworking and has brainy friends. Toni Morrison, her mentor in Princeton, commended that MacKenzie was one of the best students in she ever had in her creative-writing class. 

#5: She Worked Hard To Pay For Tuition In Princeton

At Princeton, she had to “work a variety of jobs to put me through school,” she told Charlie Rose in 2013. “Maybe 30 hours a week on top of my course load. And I got into Princeton, and I remember thinking wow, this is a huge opportunity for me,” she said, and was “worrying, thinking how, I hope that I can juggle these jobs, and still get the most out of my education.”

#6: Her Love For Books And Writing

During her work in Amazon, MacKenzie was quietly taking a night course at the University of Washington on fiction writing, then a writing workshop, working on a draft of what would become her first novel, according to her writing teacher at the time, Carole Glickfeld.

#7: MacKenzie Is A Published Author

At the age of six, she wrote 142 pages titled The Bookworm. She is currently the author of two published novels: The Testing of Luther Albright, which was named a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in 2005, and Traps. It took her a decade to complete her first book, moving cross-country, giving birth and helping her husband with Amazon.com. 

#8: She Pledged To Give Away Her Fortune

Just months after her divorce, MacKenzie quickly pledged away half of her fortune on to the Giving Pledge. Giving Pledge is led by Bill and Melinda Gates. The aim is to remake global philanthropy by encouraging earlier and bigger contributions from the new tech billionaires. 

#9: The Recipient Of Her Donation

MacKenzie sent her donation to more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, community and technical colleges and schools serving Native Americans, women, urban and rural students. Center for Disaster Philanthropy, the Chicago Community Loan Fund, Feeding America, the Navajo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund, and HBCUs ranging from Dillard University to Mississippi’s Tougaloo College. More of the list here. 

Reference:

• CNBC
• Forbes
• Maker Medium
• MacKenzie Scott