As most everyone knows by now, Mackenzie Scott is the ex-wife of billionaire Jeff Bezos. Her divorce settlement made her one of the richest people in the world. Since acquiring sole control of this fortune, she has given away billions of dollars to various organizations. Most are committed to civil rights, women’s issues, LGBT issues, and other worthy causes.
Other billionaire philanthropists, like Bill Gates, the Walton Family Foundation, the DeVos family, and others, are known for their tight control over their grantees. When they get a proposal, they expect that it will conform to their ideological preferences, and they help the grantee revise it the proposal until the grantee does precisely what the donor wants. In some cases, the philanthropist finds or even creates a group to execute their commands.
Mackenzie Scott doesn’t work that way. Her secretive organization researches groups doing admirable things and advises her to give them money. She does not want or accept proposals. She doesn’t tell grantees how to use the money she gives them. She trusts them.
As the graph in this article by Axios shows, she far outshines other billionaires (such as her ex-husband) in her generosity.
As an extensive article about her in the New York Times details, Mackenzie grew up in an affluent family and attended the elite Hotchkiss School. In her junior year, her father went bankrupt and her circumstances changed dramatically. She aspired to be a novelist. She went to Princeton on scholarship, where her mentor was the famed novelist Toni Morrison. She moved to New York City to write, took a job at a hedge fund to support herself, where she met Jeff Bezos. They married, and she helped him achieve his dream of creating the online company Amazon. After many years of marriage and four children, they divorced.
Her first big statement as a newly single woman came less than five months later on the website of the Giving Pledge, started by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett as a place where billionaires promised to give away at least half their wealth. Ms. Scott went further, promising to “keep at it until the safe is empty.”
The Giving Pledge is a public promise and little more. It has no donation schedules, no reporting requirements and no enforcement mechanisms. Still, it was a significant statement.
Nonprofits soon began receiving calls and emails about enormous grants from an anonymous donor, often the biggest donation in the group’s history or the equivalent of a full year’s budget. Some of those approaches were from staff at the influential nonprofit consultancy Bridgespan, others from representatives at Lost Horse. The chosen charities were told they could not announce the gifts until the donor did.
On July 28, 2020, Ms. Scott tweeted a link to a post on the website Medium, where she unveiled the scale of her ambition as a philanthropist. In the tweet, she added in a parenthetical: “(Note my Medium account is under my new last name — changed back to middle name I grew up with, after my grandfather Scott.)”
On Medium, she was writing in the language of equity and social justice, guiding philosophies for her giving. “Personal wealth is the product of collective effort,” she wrote, “and of social structures which present opportunities to some people, and obstacles to countless others.”
She gave overwhelmingly to groups led by women, people of color, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community or all three. The total amount of grants she was announcing came to $1.7 billion.
And that was just the beginning of her donations.
She doesn’t yet understand education issues. She has given to the very important, valuable Schott Foundation and to the Southern Education Foundation, both of which support public schools. But she also gave millions to the odious TNTP, founded by Michelle Rhee to undermine well-qualified and experienced teachers. She needs help.
I wish someone would tell her or her advisors about the Network for Public Education. We are the only mass organization (350,000 followers) fighting to protect America’s most democratic institution: its public schools, and we could surely use her support.
As a personal matter, I don’t think there should be any billionaires. I think Mackenzie Scott agrees. To the extent we have people with that kind of wealth, our tax system is broken. I would love to live in a society where there was no poverty and no billionaires and where everyone had the necessities of a decent life, with ample opportunities for their children to fulfill their dreams.
I would love to live in such a society as you envision, Diane. Maybe it’s in our next life we’ll discover it?
That is an interesting proposal. No billionaires. What if laws were made to approach this as an ideal?
The first thing that would happen would be that the wealthy would place much of their worth in the hands of various individuals who were willing, for a fee, to hide it for them. Then the government would be obliged to hire thousands of agents to investigate the fraudulent associations made to hide the money at home and abroad. Sounds expensive.
Would it not be nice to just have responsible behavior from citizens who have the sense to know better. It is hard for me to grow angry with the small time con man. He is, after all, the product of his warped society. But the big guys “richly deserve hanging” to quote Twain.
Tell her to advocate for the rich to pay their taxes instead. Billionaires really shouldn’t be influencing policy. Where ever she chooses to donate is taking away the right of the communities and society as a whole how to determine their lives.
I am not sure I agree. A wealthy person can influence society in ways that are quite beneficial. Money given to preserve a natural greenspace in a city (think Central Park in Manhattan), money given to build a library (as my old friend, Sam Kennedy, did for Konawa, OK), or money given to expand access to educational or research opportunities in some field or another (think Dolly Parton giving a million to Moderna at the start of the pandemic) are all good use of money.
But a wealthy person may also decide they are more important than others. Andrew Carnegie famously argued that his fortune was better used in building libraries than it would have been by raising the wages of his workers. I bet some of the people who were injured working for him and never compensated for it would have vigorously disagreed.
I think it matters about the wealthy person. Their gift can give freedom, or it can remove freedom.
I’m all for wealthy people giving generously in the same manner that Mackenzie Scott does. However, I am also in favor of a tax system that taxes that wealth and eliminates loopholes that allow them to hide it. there didn’t used to be billionaires and yet wealthy people still managed to give to make large philanthropic donations. we have more than enough information that allowing people to accumulate that much wealth is not only counterproductive but dangerous as well to the health of society as a whole.
I think you mean —
If every Public Sector Raiding Tax Shelter Slum Lord was a Philanthropist instead.
As others have suggested, raise the taxes on the rich to 1950s or even 1970s levels and close the loop holes. Restore Glass-Steagall, get rid of Citizen’s United and strengthen unions. Will any of this happen? It looks like unions might have a chance because of the fighting spirit of workers not because of any change in the laws which are decidedly anti-union. As for the rest, none of it is likely to happen with the GOP, corporate Democrats and phony Democrats like Manchin and Sinema (spellcheck keeps changing her name to Cinema) standing in the way of any progressive ideas.
One of the reasons marginal tax rates were so high in the 40s and 50s is because taxpayers were permitted to exclude a huge portion of capital gains from their income (50% I think). There also was an alternative tax rate of 25% if the overall tax rate on ordinary income exceeded 50%. In short, the super-wealthy were never paying anything close to the eye-grabbing top marginal rates.
According to Robert Reich, 4-1-21: Quote – In the 1950s, the highest tax rate on the richest Americans was over 90 percent. Even after tax deductions and credits, they still paid over 40 percent. But since then, tax rates have dropped dramatically. Today, after Trump’s tax cut, the richest Americans pay less than 26 percent, including deductions and credits. And this rate applies only to dollars earned in excess of $523,601. Raising the marginal tax rate by just one percent on the richest Americans would bring in an estimated $123 billion over 10 years. end quote
The wealthy paid more in taxes in the 1940s-1970s.
https://robertreich.org/post/647312846822227968
Yes, taxes are lower today for the super-rich than they were in the 40s and 50s. My point was that the 90% rate is kind of meaningless in that discussion, because it was counterbalanced by huge deductions and alternative tax rates, and because if those huge deductions and alternative rates didn’t exist, the top marginal rate never would have been 90%. People love to cite it but it’s not very illuminating.
On what monies was the 90% marginal tax rate applied? Obviously the amount of tax paid depends on a lot of factors. today tax rates on ordinary income have little effect of the super wealthy since their wealth is not derived from salaries. Pointing to one factor at any point in time probably doesn’t tell us a whole lot about taxes, but the fact that the wealthy paid much more in taxes in the ’50s is not in doubt.
This is the link to Mackenzie Scott’s author page on Amazon.
The blurb says, “MacKenzie Scott is the author of two novels, and the recipient of an American Book Award. She lives in Seattle with her four children and her husband, Dan (Jewett).”
I found this on Wiki:
“In 2006, Scott won an American Book Award for her 2005 debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright.[6] Her second novel, Traps, was published in 2013.[7] She has been executive director of Bystander Revolution, an anti-bullying organization, since she founded it in 2014.[8]”
I wonder if she’s publishing under a pen name now. If she loves to write, then she must be writing and publishing.
After all, “It remains unknown exactly what (Toni) Morrison, who served as Scott’s mentor and helped her become a novelist, said during her phone call with Bezos – though she’s previously praised Scott as an ‘extraordinary writer, almost full-blown.”
https://thepressfree.com/how-pulitzer-prize-winning-author-toni-morrison-set-mackenzie-scott-bezos-up-with-jeff/
Where do we write and to whom?
I wish I knew.
I’d be happy if just Melinda Gates were more like Mackenzie Scott, just to get the ball rolling.