MacKenzie Scott’s billion-dollar bet on vibes

Every time a MacKenzie Scott grantee talks about receiving one of her multimillion-dollar gifts, there is always a hint of the same bashfulness, the same reverence, and the same glee.

Their eyes light up. They blush a little. There’s a giggle here and there.

“It’s disarming,” said Michael Lomax, head of the United Negro College Fund, or UNCF, from the moment you get the call from her team. It starts with a message of gratitude from Scott, who became a multibillionaire overnight after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019. Then, the call pivots to a few logistics, and finally, the reveal of a large, generous gift that seems far too spontaneous to be true.

“Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe this is a hallucination,” Lomax thought when he hung up the phone with Yield Giving, Scott’s philanthropic arm a few months back.

But sure enough, when he finally found the follow-up email that, for days, got lost in cyber-purgatory, there it was. A gift from Scott, grantees say, is like getting a warm, fuzzy hug — only to find that when you pull away, someone’s slipped $100 in your pocket.

Or, in Lomax’s case, $70 million.

Since 2020, Scott has given away over $26 billion to more than 2,500 nonprofits that support causes like racial justice, education, and economic mobility. This year alone, she donated a staggering $7.2 billion, including more than $700 million to over a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, institutions that rarely receive major funding from other billionaire philanthropists and foundations. Many of Scott’s largest donations this year, which she revealed on her website in December, have also gone to fighting climate change, a cause that has faced extreme funding cuts under the Trump administration.

As philanthropic grants go, this is major league. This year’s gifts have catapulted Scott’s lifetime giving past that of George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, making her the nation’s third-most generous philanthropist, according to Forbes, behind only Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. But what makes Scott unique in an age of impact reports and optimized metrics is not just the size of her gifts; it’s her strategy.

Lately, MacKenzie Scott has been thinking a lot about birds. In her most recent essay, she asks readers to consider starlings, who fly in egalitarian tandem, taking shape as they may, unsure exactly where they will land.

Scott wants us to be more like starlings: to give with the flow. If most billionaire philanthropists come across as paternalistic, dictating where their donations should go and how they should be used, then Scott prefers to humble herself as one in a flock of interconnected birds, committed to ridding herself of “a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” as she wrote in 2021.

Scott, it seems, believes that we are all fundamentally overthinking charity. If we could trust in one another enough to just hand over the damn money already, we could help a lot more people a lot more quickly. We will never know how many millions may have died from hunger or highly preventable health conditions, because solutions were slowed down by months, if not years, of billionaire wealth hoarding and bureaucratic red tape around giving.

“What if acts of service that we can feel but can’t always measure expand our capacity for connection and trust?” Scott wrote last month.

To be clear, Scott does not actually hand out multimillion-dollar donations on a whim. At Bridgespan, she’s got a whole nonprofit vetting team, which offers consulting services for philanthropists and nonprofits hoping to maximize their impact, on call. But it’s notable that she appears to want people to think she does. She constantly reminds us to romanticize the uncertainty that comes with handing out large sums of cash to the people and places you believe in, no strings attached.

“This is a very loving kind of giving,” said Lomax, one that reflects “the love we have for other human beings.”

And maybe, just maybe, this very atypical billionaire can teach us all something about how to be a bit more fearless in the way we give and in using our gut as our guide without expecting anything in return.

Scott’s blasé, hands-off approach to philanthropy has naturally made her a kind of fairy godmother in the collective nonprofit psyche. The notoriously private Scott, who has not given an interview to the press since she was promoting her second novel in 2013, could not be reached for comment.

In the early years, some grantees didn’t even know who she was before they got the congratulatory phone call: “MacKenzie Scott thanks you for your work. Here’s $10 million. Do with it what you will.”

Just about everyone knows MacKenzie Scott’s name now.

“What holds a lot of major donors back is this fear of making a mistake or being inefficient, or giving away money and not having an impact,” said Priya Shanker, head of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. The rich are often too anxiously attached to their cash to give as generously as they probably should.

But Scott has shown “that there are enough worthy causes and enough worthy institutions that can put this money to good use” without overthinking it too much, Shanker said. “You just have to do it,” she added.

Scott often connects her giving to her own early experiences being on the receiving end of generosity. She grew up wealthy, attending a fancy prep school before her father’s business took a turn for the worse as a teen. The generosity of friends and strangers — the dentist who gave her free care or the classmate who lent her $1,000 for tuition — helped shepherd her through Princeton, where she found a lifelong mentor in the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison.

It was Morrison whose recommendation helped Scott clinch her the job as an associate at a hedge fund after graduation in 1992. She got the gig to bankroll her real vocation: her writing career.

But instead, she fell in love with the senior executive next door. Scott and Bezos wed six months later, and when he decided to move to the West Coast in 1994 and open an online bookstore, she went with him. Though she was a key contributor early on, as the bookstore ballooned into an e-commerce giant, Scott receded away from her corporate role and into her writing and motherhood, publishing two novels — one of which Morrison praised as a “rarity” that “breaks and swells the heart” — and raising four children.

By the time she and Bezos split in 2019, Amazon was valued at over $900 billion, and her 4 percent stake in the company — worth almost $36 billion at the time of their settlement — instantly made her one of the wealthiest women in the world.

One month later, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, which commits signatories to give away half their wealth in their lifetime or in their will. “Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book,” she quoted the author Annie Dillard in a letter vowing to give away most of her wealth. She then turned the advice on her philanthropy: “It will take time and effort and care. But I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.”

The crazy thing is, she’s actually doing it. Almost 13 percent of her fellow billionaires have signed the Giving Pledge. But, so far, almost none of them have given at a comparable rate despite seeing their fortunes swell over the past decade.

MacKenzie Scott’s ex-husband, her passenger prince on their road trip from New York to the Bellevue garage where Amazon was born, has not signed the Giving Pledge at all. He is much wealthier than she is, but he gives away far less each year. And when he does give, he gives like the rest of the billionaires do — with a whole lot of strings attached.

The case for vibes-based philanthropy

To understand what makes Scott special, you need to understand how other billionaires give.

If a nonprofit wants money out of Bill Gates, for example, they typically need to go through his foundation and apply for a grant, outlining a specific project proposal and budget. Then, they wait. If they’re chosen, more reporting requirements kick in. Getting your hands on even a small gift is often a total slog, an onerous months-long process involving tons of paperwork.

There are real benefits to this more cautious approach, like ensuring that the money gets where it’s intended to go and maximizes impact once it’s there. The Gates Foundation has used this method to dramatically expand access to vaccines and health care in poor countries, contributing to major reductions in child mortality and infectious diseases.

But, there are also some unintended drawbacks. Smaller nonprofits often struggle to make it through the slog at all, and even well-resourced groups say that these grant bureaucracies eat up an ungodly amount of staff time.

But, on the surface at least, Scott gives more like, dare I say, a normal person. She sees it. She likes it. She donates. It’s one-click philanthropy.

“Not only are nonprofits chronically underfunded, they are also chronically diverted from their work by fundraising, and by burdensome reporting requirements,” she wrote in 2020, adding that, because her advisory team’s preliminary “research is data-driven and rigorous, our giving process can be human and soft.”

Earlier this year, Gaby Pacheco was playing viola in a music shop in Manhattan when she got the Scott call. Her organization, TheDream.us, which offers scholarships to undocumented students, will use their gift to strengthen their work at a time when other donors have been pulling back.

It was like finding out you’re pregnant after trying for years, and “you want to run to somebody to enjoy that moment,” said Pacheco. “It is just a joy that you cannot contain for yourself.”

For hours, Pacheco wrote and rewrote her email telling students and alumni about the gift, trying to perfect it into an embrace amid “all the terrible things in the world right now, the fear, the anxiety, all the madness around immigration,” she said.

“I wanted them to know that that’s not how everyone feels,” said Pacheco. “That somebody’s looking out for them and seeing that they’re valuable, they’re worthy, they belong.”

What Pacheco experienced was trust-based philanthropy, an approach that aims to flip the normal top-down script of giving on its head by asking donors to cede some of the power they wield over grantees. It’s an approach that Scott has embraced wholeheartedly.

“It’s about trying to seat ourselves in the experience of the people who are feeling the most challenged by the system,” said Pia Infante, who helped coin the phrase over a decade ago and co-leads the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project.

In practice, that means removing burdensome requirements like lengthy financial audits and strict restrictions on where grant money can be used. It also means respecting the expertise of those closest to the issues they’re trying to address, like a person who has experienced hunger who now leads a food bank.

The pressure to impress donors sometimes warps into a race to become the most performative charity possible, which doesn’t always make them the most effective one, says Infante. Smaller charities, including highly impactful ones, frequently don’t have the time or expertise to compete for funds.

Pacheco and her staff often spend half of their time filling out impact reports for donors. Sometimes, they’ll spend months applying for a grant that never pans out.

“I believe in measurements and evaluation,” she said, but “when you are chasing dollars, you start losing focus on your mission, because you have to conform yourself to whatever that foundation cares about” instead of what’s best for your community.

This is not, by any means, an admonishment of data-driven philanthropy. As we often write about here at Future Perfect, meticulously measuring charity has done a lot of good in the world. It is a great way to seed super effective interventions like Taimaka’s fight against child malnutrition and anti-malarial, insecticide-treated nets.

In fact, some of Scott’s own grantees have reams of data to back up their work. The Malaria Consortium, named one of GiveWell’s most impactful charities last year, received $10 million from Scott in 2023. She’s donated $20 million to Evidence Action, which researches low-cost health interventions, and $4 million to Food4Education, a pioneer in cost-effective school meals.

And GiveDirectly, a darling of the effective altruism movement for its use of no-strings-attached cash transfers to fight poverty, has gotten well over $120 million from Scott since 2020.

That’s not surprising, really, given that Scott, too, prefers to give directly to her grantees, without the pomp and circumstance that most billionaires require.

“We assume that because someone’s acquired wealth or power, that they have a lot of knowledge about many things,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, vice president of research at the Center for Effective Philanthropy. “What this kind of giving does is it privileges the knowledge of people living in communities.”

In a three-year survey of over 800 of Scott’s grantees, Smith Arrillaga found, as you’d expect, that almost every organization was better off financially a few years after receiving their gift and their self-reported impact grew significantly.

Still, while it might seem hard to imagine, there can be drawbacks to being suddenly showered with cash. Scott’s skeptics point out that some charities may not be equipped to deftly manage a huge infusion of cash. And while most have in fact been able to absorb their gift strategically, there are a handful of exceptions.

Last year, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Benefits Data Trust suddenly shuttered operations just two years after receiving a $20 million grant from Scott. “It was not a secret that these multimillion-dollar grants had expiration dates,” one former staff member told me for a piece I wrote for The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

But leaders squandered the gift, investing heavily in a couple of costly AI chatbots to nowhere and straying so far from their original mission that, prior to the closure, one senior philanthropy manager resigned after they could no longer “account for where the money was going.”

”I don’t think you get responsible giving without some element of due diligence,” said Joanne Florino, a fellow at Philanthropy Roundtable, who’s been critical of trust-based philanthropy for rhetoric that she sometimes characterizes as “really extreme” for telling donors “don’t ask any questions; just give us the money and then go away.”

But, most experts say this misses what donors like Scott actually do with their cash. She’s not writing blank checks to random organizations. She’s just doing her homework differently and lightening the load for nonprofits on the other end.

And though there is still plenty of research on the backend, her process has clearly succeeded at moving a lot of money at a much faster rate than most of her peers. It comes at a moment of intense need, and with an urgency that few other donors of her class seem to grasp.

“There is this misconception that trust-based philanthropy is not strategic,” said Shanker, the head of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. “What trust based means is that it does away with these additional layers of administrative and bureaucratic burden that foundations and donors were putting on nonprofits,” she said, but “you can still be strategic.”

How to give with the flow

So, what does this mean for the rest of us who don’t have billions to give away?

Lomax, the head of UNCF, has never met MacKenzie Scott. He’d love to one day, if only to say thank you. But he did know her mentor, Toni Morrison, and he thinks that connection matters.

Just as reading a novel asks you to empathize with “someone on the outside, someone who has been marginalized,” Lomax sees Scott’s form of giving as one which “calls upon the giver to enter the life of the person they’re touching” and to connect to their own personal experience.

“We’ve been going through this period of impact philanthropy, where I’ve got to run the numbers before I decide what I give,” said Lomax, a former literature professor who’s had to learn to crunch numbers on the job.

“I’m not questioning it. I’ve learned to live in that world,” he said. But, at the same time, with Scott’s gifts, “it’s so beautiful to see a return to a very human impulse to just help somebody,” he added.

And nurturing that human impulse, he says, has rarely been this important.

A full one-third of US nonprofits have lost funding from the federal government under the Trump administration, and many have had to cut services and lay off staff. Organizations working abroad have, in some cases, faced even steeper cuts.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by it all. As Infante put it, “When everything’s on fire, how do I know where to point my hose?”

What would MacKenzie Scott do? Well, she would probably call up her vetting team. But, if you don’t have one of your own, you can mooch off of their work by perusing her website, where she lists every charity she’s donated to since 2020.

But, better yet, do the research yourself. The key here is to start off by recognizing that there is a surplus of organizations doing good for the world that are deserving of your generosity. Let yourself be moved by the charities and causes that resonate with you the most, whose leadership you trust, and whose work you think you can connect to for the long haul.

Do some vetting, of course, but don’t get so dragged down by that process that you spend more time on amateur sleuthing for the “best possible charity” than you do on actually giving back.

And, finally, if you can afford it, give big. One of Scott’s trademarks is giving large gifts that represent a huge swath of a grantee’s budget. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars for a group like UNCF.

But, most local nonprofits are actually extremely tiny, with budgets of under $500,000. For them, even a relatively small donation may be just as transformative as Scott’s blockbuster gifts.

Many of us could probably afford to spread our generosity further than we do now. Instead of only impulse buying sweater vests on Depop and tiny carrot scissors to stick on the fridge, I am actively trying to impulse hit that donation button more often this winter.

Not only for the causes that I care about, but for myself. Data-driven or not, charity was never meant to be purely transactional.

Update, December 12, 11:30 am ET: This piece was originally published on December 2 and has been updated to reflect Scott’s full giving for 2025.