Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has unveiled the ultimate tally for her 2025 charitable donations, which totaled $7.17 billion in presents to roughly 225 organizations, she wrote in a weblog publish revealed on Tuesday.
“This greenback whole will seemingly be reported within the information, however any greenback quantity is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the private expressions of care being shared into communities this yr,” Scott wrote.
Scott’s 2025 giving brings her whole donation quantity since 2019 to $26.3 billion, based mostly on her previous public bulletins of her charitable giving. This yr’s donations went to a variety of nonprofits together with a number of traditionally Black schools and universities, and organizations targeted on points together with poverty, social injustice and local weather change.
Scott’s up to date philanthropic tally places her behind solely fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Invoice Gates when it comes to lifetime giving, based on Forbes. Forbes nonetheless estimates a $29.9 billion web price for Scott, who turned one of many world’s wealthiest girls following her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
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Following her divorce, Scott signed The Giving Pledge, committing to freely giving the majority of her wealth in her lifetime. She tasked a workforce of advisors with serving to her step up her philanthropic giving by figuring out “organizations with robust management groups and outcomes” throughout a variety of areas of societal want, she wrote in a 2020 weblog publish.
Particularly, she wished to pay “particular consideration to these working in communities dealing with excessive projected meals insecurity, excessive measures of racial inequity, excessive native poverty charges and low entry to philanthropic capital,” she wrote.
In her Tuesday essay, Scott wrote about placing her giving into perspective, citing information from Giving USA, which reported in June that People donated greater than $590 billion in charitable giving in 2024. A lot of the nation’s philanthropy — whether or not financial or in any other case — occurs on a comparatively small scale, Scott wrote.
“Over 70% of People reported giving each labor and cash to folks they know, and half reported doing the identical for strangers,” wrote Scott, including: “It is easy to deal with the strategies of civic participation that make information, and laborious to think about the significance of the issues we do every day with our personal minds and hearts.”
Scott talked about a number of examples of generosity she acquired earlier than she turned rich, serving to encourage her newer philanthropy. She wrote a few “native dentist who provided me free dental work when he noticed me securing a damaged tooth with denture glue in faculty,” and her faculty roommate at Princeton College “who discovered me crying, and acted on her urge to mortgage me a thousand {dollars} to maintain me from having to drop out in my sophomore yr.”
That roommate, Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, went on to discovered Funding U, a scholar lender that gives loans to low-income college students with out requiring a co-signer, Scott famous.
Scott highlighted these examples whereas encouraging civic participation in myriad types, from monetary presents to random acts of kindness: “Respect, understanding, perception, empathy, forgiveness, inspiration – all of those are significant contributions to others.”
Scott’s weblog publish didn’t break down how or why she selected any of the a whole bunch of organizations she supported in 2025. An extended-standing side of her giving does stand out in distinction to many different billionaire philanthropists: Her donations sometimes come with none strings, which means organizations are free to make use of the cash nevertheless they see match.
Her objective has been to “de-emphasize privileged voices” like her personal, “and cede focus to others,” she wrote in a 2021 weblog publish.
“Folks struggling towards inequities deserve heart stage in tales about change they’re creating,” Scott wrote in that publish. “That is equally — maybe particularly — true when their work is funded by wealth.”
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