MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has announced that he is donating $ 2.74 million to several associations.
Among the beneficiaries: a fund for the protection of children, university departments, or the Apollo Theater in New York.
MacKenzie Scott is not at his first attempt. Become a billionaire thanks to her divorce from Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world, she multiplies donations. She is also considered one of the most important philanthropists in the United States, having given six billion dollars to people hard hit by the health crisis.
Novelist
MacKenzie Scott, 51, isn’t used to being in the spotlight though. Born in 1970 in San Francisco, she is far more interested in literature than in the pangs of fame. Becoming a novelist has always been her dream.
To achieve this, she studied at Princeton (New Jersey), a university where author Toni Morrison teaches. She notices it and presents it to literary agents. MacKenzie Scott then got down to writing his first novel, while looking for an odd job to pay his bills.
She was eventually hired in a hedge fund. Next to his desk is Jeff Bezos’s. Three months later, the two young people are engaged, married, and wish to leave New York so that Jeff Bezos can set up his big project: Amazon.
First Amazon employee
Legend has it that Jeff Bezos wrote his business plan in the back of the car while MacKenzie drove to Seattle. The company was created in 1994 with MacKenzie as its first employee. But the bigger Amazon becomes, the further it moves away from it. She stays at home to take care of her four children and to return to her initial project: to write.
After ten years of work, MacKenzie Scott published in 2005 “The Testing of Luther Albright”, the story of an engineer who sees his life collapsing after an earthquake. She continued in 2013 with “Traps”, a thriller featuring a movie star in conflict with her father. The reviews are good, but the books are not selling very well. MacKenzie Scott remains in the shadow of her husband.
25 years of marriage
The divorce of Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos is announced in January 2019, after 25 years of marriage. What initially looked like an amicable separation takes a different turn when the National Enquirer, an American tabloid, claims to have intimate photos of Jeff Bezos. He also reveals his affair with journalist Lauren Sanchez.
MacKenzie Scott has since found love again. She remarried Dan Jewett, a science teacher at a private Seattle school. She shares with him her fortune, estimated at $ 53 billion according to Forbes, which makes her the third richest woman in the world.
–
–
Dan Jewett and MacKenzie Scott participate in the Giving Pledge, a campaign launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage billionaires to donate to charities. “We are driven by the humble conviction that it would be better for disproportionate wealth not to be concentrated in the hands of a few,” said MacKenzie Scott.
–
