She’s done it again. Hyper-prolific billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has donated nearly $2 billion to over 300 organizations in the last 7 months, she announced in a post on Medium, CNN reports.
“Over the last seven months, with the help of my team, I gave $1,990,800,000 to 343 organizations supporting the voices and opportunities of people from underserved communities,” she wrote.
This follows the news of her ex-husband, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announcement that he will give away most of his wealth—$124 billion, making him the second richest person in the world—in his lifetime. He made the announcement in a joint interview Monday with his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez. Still, he faced criticism for not signing the Giving Pledge, a promise by the world’s wealthiest people to give the majority of their cash to charitable causes.
Scott has signed the Giving Pledge in 2019, shortly after ending her 25-year marriage to Bezos, and has since been on a mission to rid herself of the fortune in divorce money—initially with the assistance of her second husband, former teacher at her kids’ high school Dan Jewett, who she divorced in September. Now, she’s doling it out solo. According to Forbes‘ estimate, she has given away $14.4 billion to over 1500 organizations since her divorce from Bezos.
As recently as 2021, Scott showered local charities with over $2.7 billion, notably aiding multiple Los Angeles organizations. In September 2022, she even went on to donate $55 million worth of Beverly Hills property to the California Community Foundation.
Scott owned a roughly 2.9 percent stake in Amazon as of February of this year, and has a net worth of $28.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making her the 39th richest person in the world. That number has kept falling the more of her money she has given away.
The Giving Pledge has caused a problem for some billionaires who signed it, according tp a report by the Institute for Policy Studies in 2020. The authors wrote that “while some pledgers earnestly intend to fulfill their promises, many are unable to because their assets are simply growing too fast.” For many of the truly rich, if they want to give away most of their money in their lifetime, they’ll have to “dramatically accelerate their giving just to keep up with their asset growth.”
Scott has no problem keeping up the pace.
In 2020, she wrote on Medium, “I pledged to give the majority of my wealth back to the society that helped generate it, to do it thoughtfully, to get started soon, and to keep at it until the safe is empty.”
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