How She's Spending Her $78 Billion Fortune

The novelist and philanthropist has given up voting rights in Amazon, but her huge wealth gives her significant power.

- Margi Murphy

“The book is full of techniques which stretch the boundaries of non-fiction, and the result is a lopsided and misleading portrait.” That was one Amazon reviewer’s one-star verdict on The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone, a 2013 history of the Seattle-based online shopping behemoth.

Many authors would not feel the need to respond specifically, as Stone did later, to even so scathing a review. Then again, most Amazon reviewers are not MacKenzie Scott, then known as MacKenzie Bezos, one of Amazon’s earliest employees and also the wife of its founder Jeff Bezos.

This elegant rebuke was a rare foray into the limelight for Scott, who has largely shied away from public attention both before and after announcing her divorce in 2019 with coordinated his-and-hers statements on Twitter.

Unlike Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, who hopped on jets to attend red carpets for film festivals and celebrity-packed events before Covid-19 brought an abrupt end to socialising, Scott has not been pictured in public since the separation.

And yet her first move after that made a bold statement. Having walked away with 4 percent of the company, now worth US$58.9 billion ($78.3 billion), the 51-year-old novelist showed little interest in getting back into the boardroom, allowing Bezos to retain the voting rights to her 19.7 million shares.

The same year, however, she pledged to donate half her fortune — and unlike many peers who made the same promise, she immediately began doing so in large amounts. One philanthropy adviser described her total disbursement for 2020 of nearly US$6 billion as “one of the biggest annual distributions by a living individual” to working charities.