MacKenzie Scott accounted for around one third of the $19.2 billion (£14.2 billion) in megagifts made by US donors in 2025, after giving approximately $7 billion to charitable causes.
The donations took Scott’s total giving over five years to $26.2 billion, supporting thousands of organisations working in areas including housing, diversity, equity and inclusion, and disaster recovery.
Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was the largest megadonor identified in figures from Giving USA and Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Other major donors in 2025 included Michael Bloomberg, who gave $4.3 billion, Bill Gates with $3.7 billion, Warren Buffett with $1.34 billion, and Susan and Michael Dell, who donated nearly $1 billion.
Overall charitable giving in the US reached $617.2 billion last year, a 5.7 per cent increase on the previous year. The total included donations from individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations to charities.
“It was a positive year for charitable giving, with virtually all categories of recipient organisations achieving solid or better growth at the aggregate level,” said Gabe Cooper, vice-chair of the Giving USA Foundation and founder and chief executive of Virtuous.
The largest areas of funding included religion, human services, education, health, international affairs, and arts and culture.
MacKenzie Scott keeps philanthropy out of the spotlight
Despite the scale of her donations, Scott did not appear on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of the 50 biggest donors this year. The publication said this was largely because she keeps details of her giving private and does not seek publicity for her gifts.
“MacKenzie Scott is among the notable absences on the Philanthropy 50 list,” the Chronicle said. “While it is possible she made gifts to her donor-advised funds that would have earned her a spot on the Philanthropy 50, she and her representatives declined to provide such information to the Chronicle.”
Scott has said her approach to philanthropy was influenced by acts of kindness in her own life, including a college roommate giving her $1,000 so she could remain in education and a dentist providing free treatment when she could not afford it.
“It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible,” Scott wrote in an essay. “The potential of peaceful, non-transactional contribution has long been underestimated, often on the basis that it is not financially self-sustaining, or that some of its benefits are hard to track. But what if these imagined liabilities are actually assets?”
She also wrote that generosity and kindness “engage the same pleasure centres in the brain as sex, food, and receiving gifts, and they improve our health and long-term happiness as well”.
Following her divorce from Bezos, Scott signed the Giving Pledge and promised to give away the majority of her wealth. Her fortune remains close to $37 billion, largely because of the value of the Amazon shares she received as part of the divorce.
