Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott announced that she distributed $7.17 billion in charitable donations in 2025, bringing her total giving since 2019 to $26.3 billion, according to a blog post she published Tuesday. The latest round of gifts went to roughly 225 organizations spanning a wide range of causes, including several historically Black colleges and universities, as well as nonprofits addressing poverty, social injustice, and climate change.
While the size of the donations has drawn widespread attention, Scott emphasized that dollar figures alone do not capture the meaning of philanthropy. “This dollar total will likely be reported in the news, but any dollar amount is a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care being shared into communities this year,” Scott wrote in her post.
Scott’s cumulative giving places her behind only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in terms of lifetime charitable contributions, according to Forbes. Despite giving away tens of billions of dollars, Forbes still estimates her net worth at $29.9 billion. Scott became one of the world’s wealthiest women following her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and subsequently signed The Giving Pledge, committing to donate the majority of her wealth during her lifetime.
Since then, Scott has pursued a philanthropic approach that prioritizes speed, scale, and flexibility. In a 2020 blog post, she explained that she instructed her advisors to identify “organizations with strong leadership teams and results” and to pay “special attention to those operating in communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates and low access to philanthropic capital.”
In her most recent essay, Scott also sought to place her giving within a broader national context. Citing Giving USA data, she noted that Americans donated more than $590 billion in 2024 and highlighted that generosity often occurs far from headlines. “Over 70% of Americans reported giving both labor and money to people they know, and half reported doing the same for strangers,” she wrote, adding: “It’s easy to focus on the methods of civic participation that make news, and hard to imagine the importance of the things we do each day with our own minds and hearts.”
A defining feature of Scott’s philanthropy remains its lack of restrictions. Her donations typically come without conditions, allowing recipient organizations to determine how best to use the funds. As she wrote in a 2021 post, her aim has been to “de-emphasize privileged voices” and shift attention to those directly addressing inequities. “People struggling against inequities deserve center stage in stories about change they are creating,” Scott wrote.
