MacKenzie Scott, a novelist and philanthropist who was an early contributor to Amazon, is ranked No. 84 on the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, tied with Prajogo Pangestu, with a net worth of $28.6 billion. She has given away $26.3 billion to more than 1,600 organisations.
MacKenzie Scott (née Tuttle, formerly Bezos) was born on April 7, 1970, in San Francisco, California, to Holiday Robin (née Cuming), a homemaker, and Jason Baker Tuttle, a financial planner. She says she remembers writing seriously at six. She graduated from the Hotchkiss School in 1988 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University in 1992, where she studied under the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
Net Worth and Rank
- Forbes 2026 list: No. 84 (tied with Prajogo Pangestu), with $28.6 billion
- Other estimate: Wikipedia says Bloomberg put her wealth at $40.0 billion in December 2025, with a 1.3% stake in Amazon
Writing and Amazon
After college Scott worked as a research assistant to Toni Morrison on the novel Jazz and then in an administrative role at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw, where she met Jeff Bezos. They married in 1993; the next year they moved to Seattle and Bezos founded Amazon with her support. Scott was one of Amazon’s early key contributors, working on its name, business plan, accounts and order shipping, and negotiating its first freight contract. Her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright (2005), won an American Book Award in 2006, and her second, Traps, was published in 2013.
The 2019 Divorce
Their community-property divorce in 2019 left Scott with $35.6 billion of Amazon stock, while Bezos kept 75% of the couple’s Amazon stock. In May 2019 she signed the Giving Pledge. In 2021 she married the teacher Dan Jewett; she filed for divorce in September 2022 and it was finalised in January 2023.
Philanthropy
- 2020: she gave $5.8 billion, one of the largest annual distributions by a private individual to working charities
- 2021: she gave a further $2.7 billion
- Total: $26.3 billion to more than 1,600 organisations, as of December 2025, through her vehicle Yield Giving
- Bystander Revolution: she has been executive director of this anti-bullying organisation, which she founded in 2014
Recognition
Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in 2020, and Forbes has listed her among the world’s 100 most powerful women in 2021, 2023 and 2025.
Why It Matters
Scott is among the largest individual donors in the world, and her fortune, based on Amazon shares, falls as she gives it away and rises with Amazon’s share price.
Net worth figures change daily with share prices. Rankings here follow the Forbes 2026 World’s Billionaires list, with wealth measured on March 1, 2026.
Image: Nassau Hall at Princeton University, where MacKenzie Scott earned her degree (file photo, 2012; she is not pictured). Photo: Smallbones / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
