MacKenzie Scott Gave Away $7.2B in 2025—Here’s Who Benefited Most
MacKenzie Scott keeps her giving largely out of the public eye—allowing recipients to decide whether to disclose funding amounts, awarding mostly unsolicited grants, and acknowledging her philanthropy only through annual or semi-annual online posts. The one thing that isn’t subtle about her donations? Their size.
Scott gave a staggering $7.2 billion in 2025, the philanthropist revealed in a blog post earlier this month. The annual update brings her total giving over the past six years to more than $26 billion. It also places her just behind fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in lifetime philanthropic giving.
Scott, whose estimated $30 billion net worth is largely tied to her Amazon stake from her former marriage to Jeff Bezos, pledged in 2019 to donate the bulk of this fortune to charity. If this year’s totals are any indication, she is accelerating toward that goal: her 2025 giving far outpaced the $2.6 billion and $2.1 billion she donated in 2024 and 2023, respectively.
“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 blog post. She pointed to the $471 billion donated to U.S. charities in 2020, nearly a third of which came from gifts under $5,000, as evidence of the power of collective philanthropy.
Of the nearly 200 organizations supported by Scott in 2025, roughly 120 were repeat grantees. The largest single grant went to Forests, People, Climate (FPC), a collaborative charitable effort focused on reversing tropical deforestation, which received $90 million—boosting its total funding to more than $1 billion. “Now is the time for climate philanthropy to take action with vision and courage: to embrace the potential of forests and back the bold leaders best suited to protect them,” said Lindsey Allen, executive director of FPC, in a statement announcing the gift earlier this month.
The second-largest donation went to another environmental organization, Ocean Resilience & Climate Alliance, while a slew of other major gifts flowed toward education. She donated $70 million to both UNCF and Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which support historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and also gave $63 million each to Prairie View A&M University, Morgan State University and Howard University. Other notable education-focused recipients included the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and Native Forward Scholars Fund, which received $70 million and $50 million, respectively.
As a result, education emerged as the largest beneficiary of Scott’s 2025 giving, accounting for 18 percent of the total. Organizations focused on economic security and funding and regranting each received 13 percent, while environmental causes accounted for 12 percent. Additional funding went to groups working in equity and justice, democratic processes, health, and arts and culture.
Besides the sheer scale of her philanthropy, Scott’s approach stands out for its unrestricted nature, giving grantees full control over how funds are used. That flexibility has been widely welcomed, according to a recent study from the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which found that nearly 90 percent of surveyed organizations reported improved long-term financial sustainability as a result of Scott’s donations. The median grant size was $5 million.
Scott has attributed her generosity to the kindness she has received from others. “Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give?” she wrote. “It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”
The roommate, Jeannie Tarkenton, later founded Funding U, a lending company offering loans to low-income students without the need for co-signers. Scott has since earmarked funds for the company, she noted in her recent blog post, describing how she “[jumped] at the chance to be one of the people who supported her dreams of supporting students just as she had once supported me.”
Scott’s financial contributions to Funding U will take the form of an investment rather than a donation. Alongside her philanthropic giving, she announced last year that she plans to pursue for-profit investments in “mission-aligned ventures” aimed at addressing challenges such as affordable housing and access to health care.