Mackenzie Scott has been one of the most generous philanthropists of the past few years, and an incident in college may help explain why.
After her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Scott ended up with a large chunk of the stock she had acquired while helping to build the e-commerce giant in its early days, when she helped craft business plans and contracts. After the divorce, Scott received about 4% of Amazon’s shares, or about 139 million shares at the time.
Since 2020, Scott has reduced his holdings by 42%, selling or donating approximately 58 million shares. Although the philanthropist has donated $26 billion through Yield Giving, the philanthropic platform she founded in 2022, she is still worth nearly $28 billion today. Yield Giving has donated to thousands of organizations focusing on DEI, education, disaster recovery and more.
This fall alone, she has donated more than $400 million to multiple education and DEI-focused organizations, many of which have received the largest donations in their respective histories.
Scott sees the value and need for support, especially in someone’s early stages of development. After all, she had to borrow money from her college roommates when she was in trouble.
“It’s these ripple effects that make it impossible for us to imagine the power of any act of kindness on our own,” Scott wrote of the donation in an Oct. 15 post on her Yield Giving website. “Whenever I make each of the thousands of gifts I am able to give, whose generosity do I think about?
“It was the local dentist who provided me with free dental services in college after seeing me fixing a broken tooth with denture glue. It was my college roommate who caught me crying and, at her urging, lent me a thousand dollars so I wouldn’t have to drop out my sophomore year.”
After graduating from Princeton, Scott went on to become a gifted novelist—a product of Toni Morrison’s teachings. In 2005, Scott published her debut novel, The Test of Luther AlbrightThe book won the American Book Award in 2006. Morrison described the book as “that rare thing: a heartbreakingly complex novel that is as heartbreaking as it is expansive.”
Her roommate from Princeton saw the difference the $1,000 gift made in her life, which inspired her roommate to start a company 20 years later to provide loans to low-income students without co-owners.
That roommate was Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, who later founded Funding U, an organization that has provided $80 million in low-interest loans to about 8,000 students who need help paying for college, according to Princeton University. Still, Tarkenton remained cool when asked how she changed Scott’s life.
