A $1,000 loan kept MacKenzie Scott in college—now the billionaire philanthropist is giving away her $37 billion fortune to repay it forward

MacKenzie Scott has been one of the most generous philanthropists during the past few years, and an episode in college may help explain why.

After finalizing her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, Scott ended up with a load of shares she earned from helping to build the e-commerce giant during its early days, when she helped with business plans and contracts.

Upon their divorce, Scott received roughly a 4% stake in Amazon, or about 139 million shares at the time.

Since 2020, Scott has reduced her stake by 42% , selling or donating about 58 million shares.

The philanthropist is still worth about $37 billion today , despite having donated $26 billion through her philanthropic platform Yield Giving during the past few years.

Yield Giving has donated to thousands of organizations, focused on issues including DEI, education, disaster recovery, and more.

Last fall alone, she donated well over $400 million to several education- and DEI-focused organizations, many of which received the largest gifts in their respective histories—and her grand total for 2025 exceeded $7 billion, making her the biggest megadonor that year.

Scott sees the value of and need for support, especially during someone’s early, formative years.

After all, she had to borrow money from her college roommate when she was struggling.

“It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible,” Scott wrote of giving in an essay published to her Yield Giving site last October.

“Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give? “It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college.

It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.” After graduating from Princeton University, Scott went on to become a talented novelist—a product of none other than Toni Morrison’s teaching.

And in 2005, Scott published her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright , which won an American Book Award in 2006.

Morrison reviewed the book as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.” Scott, as of recent, is actually returning to her roots and publishing a novel chapter by chapter on Substack .