
Three decades after worrying about making rent, and even in the wake of her recent gifts, Scott (52) has a fortune that hovers around $50 billion (€46 billion), according to Forbes magazine.

#Ready ready kevin gates download archive
This article is also based on previously unpublished letters between Scott and Morrison, kept in the Nobel laureate’s archive at the Princeton University library. Instead, the newspaper relied on interviews with more than two dozen friends, teachers, former colleagues and acquaintances from every chapter of her life, as well as public records and the rare interviews Scott has given, generally in conjunction with the publication of one of her novels. Photograph: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images That clamour may have driven Scott’s already discreet operation further underground, with recent philanthropic announcements akin to sudden lightning bolts for unsuspecting recipients.Īttempts to reach Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, a chemistry teacher, for this article – which was originally published by the New York Times – by phone, email and letter, directly and through intermediaries, were met with silence. Forbes in January calculated that he had paid out $2.1 billion in charitable giving so far.īut as Scott’s fame for giving away money has grown, so too has the deluge of appeals for gifts from strangers and old friends alike. Scott’s former husband, Bezos, has pledged $10 billion to combat climate change. The $12 billion in grants she has announced add up to more than the total lifetime giving of Eli Broad and his widow, Edythe, renowned for their generosity in Los Angeles, not to mention far richer couples, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Her sudden spate of giving has now reached 1,257 groups, from little-known charities to mainstream organisations like Habitat for Humanity, which last month received $436 million (€400 million), her largest known gift. The secret benefactor turned out, of course, to be Scott. Soon, representatives from Lost Horse were calling nonprofits around the country about multimillion-dollar donations from an anonymous giver. Scott has a fortune that hovers around $50 billion (€46 billion), according to Forbes magazineĪ few months after their divorce was finalised in 2019, a new shell company was quietly set up in Delaware called Lost Horse, LLC. That allowed her to carry on studying creative writing under acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison, who would become her mentor and help her achieve her own life’s goal of becoming a novelist as well.Īnd as a recent college graduate, working in recruitment at a financial firm, she married the man in the office next to hers, Jeff Bezos, and moved to Seattle to help him pursue his dream of an online retail empire – one that would make each of them among the wealthiest people in the world even after their marriage dissolved. In college, a loan from a friend helped keep her from dropping out. Her own life has taken sharp turns that have shaped her choices, including her extraordinary leap into philanthropy, which in less than three years has exceeded $12 billion(€11 billion) in grants.Ī privileged child, she left a Connecticut boarding school after her family declared bankruptcy. The hardships we experience “are the things that we’ll look back and be the most grateful for,” she said during the interview. “Good luck, bad luck, it’s not the way that we really need to look at things.”


“You never know where it’s going to end up,” she told television host Charlie Rose in 2013, after relating the parable to him. It can also be read as a summary of Scott’s philosophy.

The story is about the reversals of fortune a farmer experiences after his prized stallion runs away. Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott once recounted, in a television interview, a Chinese folk tale sometimes known as “The Lost Horse”.
