MacKenzie Scott

As such, Scott is the third-wealthiest woman in the United States and the 47th-wealthiest individual in the world.

Scott was named the world's most powerful woman by Forbes in 2021 and one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2020.

MacKenzie Scott (née Tuttle, formerly Bezos; born April 7, 1970) is an American novelist and philanthropist.

As of January 2024, she has a net worth of US$40.6 billion, owning a 4% stake in Amazon, the company she and her ex-husband, Jeff Bezos, founded.

MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was born on April 7, 1970, in San Francisco, California, to Holiday Robin (née Cuming), a homemaker, and Jason Baker Tuttle, a financial planner.

She has two brothers.

She was named after her maternal grandfather, G. Scott Cuming, who worked as an executive and general counsel at El Paso Natural Gas.

She remembers seriously writing at the age of six, when she wrote The Book Worm, a 142-page book that was destroyed in a flood.

In 1988, she graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut.

In 1992, Tuttle earned her bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University, where she studied under Nobel Laureate in Literature Toni Morrison, who described Tuttle as "one of the best students I've ever had in my creative writing classes."

After graduating from college, Tuttle worked as a research assistant to Morrison for the 1992 novel Jazz.

She also worked in an administrative role for hedge fund D. E. Shaw in New York City, where she met Jeff Bezos.

She met him while working as an administrative assistant at D.E. Shaw in 1992; after three months of dating, they married and moved from Manhattan to Seattle, Washington, in 1994.

They have four children: three sons, and an adopted daughter from China.

In 1993, Scott and Bezos married.

The following year, they left D. E. Shaw, moved to Seattle, and started Amazon.

Scott was one of Amazon's founders and was heavily involved in Amazon's early days, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts, and shipping early orders.

She also negotiated the company's first freight contract.

After 1996, Scott took a less involved role in the business, focusing on her family and literary career.

In 2005, Scott wrote her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, for which she won an American Book Award in 2006.

She said that the book took her ten years to write as she was helping Bezos build Amazon and raising her family.

Toni Morrison, her former professor, reviewed the book as "a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart".

In 2006, Scott won an American Book Award for her 2005 debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright. Her second novel, Traps, was published in 2013.

Her second novel, Traps, was published in 2013.

According to NPD BookScan, sales of her books were modest.

Scott was married to Jeff Bezos.

She has been executive director of Bystander Revolution, an anti-bullying organization, since she founded it in 2014.

Their community property divorce in 2019 left Scott with US$35.6 billion in Amazon stock while her former husband retained 75% of the couple's Amazon stock.

She became the third-wealthiest woman in the world and one of the wealthiest people overall in April 2019.

In May 2019, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, a charitable-giving campaign in which she undertook to give away most of her wealth to charity over her lifetime or in her will.

Despite its name, the pledge is not legally binding.

She is committed to giving at least half of her wealth to charity as a signatory to the Giving Pledge, Scott made US$5.8 billion in charitable gifts in 2020, one of the largest annual distributions by a private individual to working charities.

She donated a further $2.7 billion in 2021.

As of mid-December 2022, Scott had given a total of $14 billion to over 1600 charitable organizations.

In July 2020, Scott was ranked the 22nd-richest person in the world by Forbes with a net worth estimated at $36 billion.

By September 2020, Scott was named the world's richest woman, and by December 2020, her net worth was estimated at $62 billion.

After her divorce from Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos changed her name to MacKenzie Scott, with the surname derived from her middle name.

In 2021, Scott married Lakeside School science teacher Dan Jewett.

The marriage was revealed in Jewett's Giving Pledge letter posted on March 6, 2021.

In September 2022, Scott filed for divorce, which was finalized in January 2023.