Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has unveiled the final tally for her 2025 charitable donations, which totaled $7.17 billion in gifts to roughly 225 organizations, she wrote in a blog post published on Tuesday.
“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.
Scott’s 2025 giving brings her total donation amount since 2019 to $26.3 billion, based on her past public announcements of her charitable giving. This year’s donations went to a wide range of nonprofits including several historically Black colleges and universities, and organizations focused on issues including poverty, social injustice and climate change.
Scott’s updated philanthropic tally puts her behind only fellow billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in terms of lifetime giving, according to Forbes. Forbes still estimates a $29.9 billion net worth for Scott, who became one of the world’s wealthiest women following her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
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Following her divorce, Scott signed The Giving Pledge, committing to giving away the bulk of her wealth in her lifetime. She tasked a team of advisors with helping her step up her philanthropic giving by identifying “organizations with strong leadership teams and results” across a wide range of areas of societal need, she wrote in a 2020 blog post.
Specifically, she wanted 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,” she wrote.
In her Tuesday essay, Scott wrote about putting her giving into perspective, citing data from Giving USA, which reported in June that Americans donated more than $590 billion in charitable giving in 2024. Much of the country’s philanthropy — whether monetary or otherwise — happens on a relatively small scale, Scott wrote.
“Over 70% of Americans reported giving both labor and money to people they know, and half reported doing the same for strangers,” wrote Scott, 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.”
Scott mentioned multiple examples of generosity she received before she became wealthy, helping inspire her more recent philanthropy. She wrote about a “local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college,” and her college roommate at Princeton University “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.”
That roommate, Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, went on to found Funding U, a student lender that offers loans to low-income students without requiring a co-signer, Scott noted.
Scott highlighted those examples while encouraging civic participation in myriad forms, from financial gifts to random acts of kindness: “Respect, understanding, insight, empathy, forgiveness, inspiration – all of these are meaningful contributions to others.”
Scott’s blog post did not break down how or why she chose any of the hundreds of organizations she supported in 2025. A long-standing aspect of her giving does stand out in contrast to many other billionaire philanthropists: Her donations typically come without any strings, meaning organizations are free to use the money however they see fit.
Her goal has been to “de-emphasize privileged voices” like her own, “and cede focus to others,” she wrote in a 2021 blog post.
“People struggling against inequities deserve center stage in stories about change they are creating,” Scott wrote in that post. “This is equally — perhaps especially — true when their work is funded by wealth.”
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