MacKenzie Scott is an American novelist and philanthropist who became one of the wealthiest women in the world following her 2019 divorce from [[Jeff Bezos]], co-founder of [[Amazon]]. She received approximately four percent of Amazon's outstanding shares in the settlement, a stake initially valued at around $36 billion. Scott had been involved in Amazon's founding and worked at the company in its early years before focusing on her writing career, publishing two novels that received critical recognition. Since 2019, Scott has distinguished herself through an extraordinarily rapid and large-scale approach to charitable giving. She signed the Giving Pledge in 2019 and subsequently donated over $19 billion to thousands of organizations, many of them small nonprofits serving historically underfunded communities. Her giving has prioritized racial equity, gender equity, public health, climate change, and economic mobility, often directing funds to organizations led by people from the communities they serve. Scott's philanthropic approach stands in sharp contrast to the donor-advised fund and strategic influence models common among the ultra-wealthy, placing her outside the patterns typical of the [[Plutocracy]] and the broader [[Philanthropy Ecosystem]]. Rather than building a large foundation staff or attaching conditions to grants, she has emphasized trust-based giving with minimal restrictions, allowing recipient organizations to deploy funds according to their own priorities.