The terrible philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott
Find out what the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos has been funding in the United States
Last week Forbes published a glowing piece about the philanthropy of MacKenzie Scott (the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos), who “gave away more than anyone else on Earth in 2025” and is “the third-biggest philanthropist of all-time.”
Sounds good, right? That’s until you see what she has actually funded, which is the grant-equivalent of HELL ON EARTH.
Like many other philanthropists, Scott is signed up to the utterly ghastly “Giving Pledge” - founded in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett - “a promise by the world’s wealthiest philanthropists to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetime or wills.”
Like I say, it all sounds like a good thing, all these billionaires pouring their wealth into “philanthropy”. That’s until you start examining what this looks like in practice. Scott’s is about as woke as it gets, as you can see from the areas she funded in 2020 through her organisation Yield:
Let’s just say, if I started a US charity called The Indigenous Leprechaun Centre for Queer Climate Justice, I could probably get funding from MacKenzie Scott - and make that a few million dollars.
Without further ado, here are 20 grants Scott has funded, with their descriptions (taken from the Yield website):
