Amazon put a slice of itself in MacKenzie Scott’s name in 2019, and she has spent the years since giving the money away, while Jeff Bezos still casts the votes on whatever she has kept.
MacKenzie Scott has held Amazon stock in her own name since 2019 and has never had the vote on any of it. The vote belongs to Jeff Bezos under a clause in Amazon’s 8-K of 4 April 2019. That clause explains the shape of her giving more neatly than the famous percentage beside it.
The usual telling runs on two numbers: what she received and what she has given away. The divorce is the prologue and the cheques are the plot. A third number appears in filings made under her former husband’s name, and it quietly shows the stake getting smaller.
Our rule here is to read the documents before anyone’s estimate: Amazon’s filing for the stake, and Scott’s own year-end essays for the giving. Her net worth comes last, and briefly, because she controls that figure least.
Amazon’s divorce filing left Bezos holding her votes
The stake is older than the divorce. Princeton Alumni Weekly says Scott helped Bezos start Amazon in the couple’s garage in 1994 and handled the back-office administration, the part of a young company that keeps it solvent and never makes the anecdote.
Twenty-five years later the company had to describe her share of it to the market, and it did so on information from him. On 4 April 2019, the day the divorce petition was filed, Amazon disclosed that Bezos had told it that, once a court approved the decree, shares representing approximately 4.0 per cent of its outstanding common stock would be registered in the name of MacKenzie T. Bezos as separate property. The filing expected that decree in about 90 days. A King County, Washington, judge finalised the divorce in July.
Scott gave her own account that April. She said she was keeping a quarter of the couple’s Amazon shares and giving Bezos her interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin. Read as a division of assets, it was tidy. She kept a large economic stake in the company she had helped start, and he took the newspaper and the rockets.
The more consequential sentence in the filing concerns who speaks for the shares. Bezos kept sole voting authority over them. The proxy falls away from any share Scott sells on the open market, and from any share she gives to a 501(c)(3) charity that is expected to sell it. Otherwise it ends only on Bezos’s death or legal incapacity.
DDW’s reading is that this clause, more than the percentage, set the terms for everything that followed. Amazon’s other shareholders were told, in effect, that the divorce would divide the ownership and leave the votes where they had always been. Scott could hold the stock, sell it or give it away. She could never vote it.
Scott publishes her giving totals in essays
The pledge came quickly. In May 2019, weeks after the filing and before the decree, she signed the Giving Pledge, promising to give more than half her fortune to philanthropy. Bezos has not signed it, a difference that would matter more as the years went on.
Her first large announcements came in 2020, in July and again in December. The December round went to 384 organisations, chosen after advisers had narrowed a field of almost 6,500. The choosing took place out of public view, and the public learned about it once it was done. That has remained the rhythm.
Since December 2022 the record has had a home of its own. Yield Giving is the website that carries her essays and a database of her gifts. Its essays give the totals in her words before anyone else’s, and the name on them is no longer the one on Amazon’s 2019 filing.
Her essay for 2025, We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, puts her giving since the previous December at $7.166bn, with 186 recipients named on 9 December 2025. In the same essay Scott calls the dollar total “a vanishingly tiny fraction of the personal expressions of care”. It is a novelist’s way of disowning the scoreboard while posting the score.
CBS News, on 9 December 2025, put her total since 2019 at $26.3bn. On the same report’s figures, her 2025 giving was more than double what she had acknowledged for either of the two years before it. Her titles are plainer than her prose. The December 2023 update was called, simply, Giving Update.
Recipients often announce her gifts first
Between the December essays, the running total is not hers to tell. Fortune, on 11 November 2026, described her as giving quietly and often skipping major announcements. As a result, much of what the public learns in the middle of a year arrives through the organisations that receive the money, in their own press releases and on their own terms.
The 2026 example is a kitchen-table one. Fortune covered a $70m gift to Meals on Wheels America on 13 April 2026, and the same report put her total giving to historically Black colleges and universities past $1bn. Neither figure came with a Scott announcement attached. Both reached the public because recipients and reporters added them up.
A gift announced by the charity is a gift the charity gets to describe. That suits a donor who would rather the recipients were the story. The arrangement also produces an odd paper trail. Scott’s full accounting comes once a year, in her voice. Everything in between belongs to whoever was handed the cheque.
Bezos’s filing shows her stake getting smaller
The share count is the one number in her story that reaches the public through his paperwork rather than hers. Because Bezos holds the vote, her stock appears in filings made under his name. A filing covering 30 September 2025 listed 81.1 million Amazon shares over which he has sole voting authority, the line that carries her holding. That figure was 58 million lower than a year before.
Fortune, in October 2025, noted that the filing did not say whether the fall came from sales, donations or both. The 2019 clause explains why the document cannot settle the question. A share leaves Bezos’s voting column when Scott sells it on the market, and also when she gives it to a charity expected to sell it. From his side of the ledger, a sale and a gift look identical.
So the shrinking number is best read as a measure of how much she has let go of, by whatever route. It does not show how much she has sold, and it does not show how much she has given. The essays supply the giving. The filing supplies the remaining shares. Only Scott could supply the link between the two, and she has chosen to publish the first and leave the second to his lawyers.
Bezos put his giving into an Earth Fund
Bezos took a different road out of the same Amazon fortune. He launched the Bezos Earth Fund in 2020, and Fortune’s piece of 11 November 2026, the one that described Scott’s quieter habit, described his wife Lauren Sánchez Bezos as steering the $10bn fund. Scott signed a public promise and sends her money to other people’s organisations. Bezos built a fund with his name over the door and his wife at the wheel. Each is a recognisable way to give away a fortune, and the two could hardly look less like each other.
Her year-end updates arrive in early December
The obvious follow-up is how much she has left. Fortune put her fortune at $38.9bn in May 2026, and reported the same month that she had been left off the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s top-50 list despite her 2025 giving. The donor who skips the announcements has also, it turns out, skipped a league table.
Her running total for 2026 will come from her, in the essay she publishes on Yield Giving, rather than from a recipient’s press release or an estimate. Her year-end updates have landed in early December, and that is where the next figure will appear, with the names attached.
The 2019 arrangement will not change when that figure arrives. For every Amazon share she still holds, the vote stays where Amazon’s filing put it, with Bezos.
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