MacKenzie Scott

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MacKenzie Scott is a major shareholder of Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer. The Seattle-based company sells electronics, household goods and other products through its flagship website. It also controls the Whole Foods grocery chain and offers cloud computing and streaming services. Amazon had revenue of $469.8 billion in 2021.

The majority of Scott’s fortune is derived from a 3% stake in Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer.

Her stake, which she agreed to as part of her divorce with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was first disclosed in an April 4, 2019 filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission. She’s credited with a 2.6% stake based on a January 2023 schedule filing that showed Jeff Bezos had proxy voting power over 266 million shares.

She wrote about the terms of the divorce in a tweet on April 4, 2019. “Happy to be giving him all of my interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, and 75% of our Amazon stock plus voting control of my shares,” she wrote.

Since she wrote that letter, Scott has announced more than $14 billion worth of charitable gifts. Starting in 2021, those gifts were incorporated via a liability. When disclosures of her Amazon position show her sharecount is dropped, the liability has been reduced by the value of the sharecount change.

Her cash balance includes Bloomberg’s estimate of the assets she received in the divorce outside of the Amazon shares and has been adjusted to reflect an analysis of dividends, insider transactions, taxes and market performance.

Biography

Education: Princeton University, Hotchkiss School/The

MacKenzie Scott was born in San Francisco, California on April 7, 1970. She attended the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut and then went on to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English at Princeton University in 1992. She studied under, and was an assistant for, noted author Toni Morrison.

Scott began working as a research associate at D.E. Shaw in New York in 1992. While there, she met Jeff Bezos, and the two married in 1993. They moved to Seattle, Washington the next year. MacKenzie was involved in the founding of Amazon, working as an accountant for the firm and negotiating their first freight contract. The couple has four children.

Scott has written two published novels, “The Testing of Luther Albright,” which won an American Book Award, and “Traps”.

On Jan. 9, 2019 their divorce was announced in a Twitter post. About three months later, Scott tweeted the terms of the divorce. She received a 4% stake in Amazon as part of their separation. In July, MacKenzie said she would be going by her middle name Scott.

She has since remarried Dan Jewett, a science teacher at the private Lakeside School. Jewett wrote in a March 6, 2021 post on the Giving Pledge website about their marriage and philanthropic plans.

Milestones

• 1970 Born in San Francisco.
• 1993 Marries Jeff Bezos.
• 1994 Moves to Seattle, Washington.
• 1997 Helps her then husband start Amazon.com Inc.
• 2005 The Testing of Luther Albright, written by Bezos, is published.
• 2013 Her book Traps is published by Knopf.