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BILLIONAIRE
- With a net worth of $66.4 billion, novelist MacKenzie Scott became the world’s richest woman on Monday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
- The 50-year-old former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos overtook L’Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers for the first time to become the world’s 12th richest person.
Who is MacKenzie Scott?
- MacKenzie Scott is an American novelist and philanthropist who was born and raised in San Francisco, California.
- She graduated from the prestigious US ivy league Princeton University, with a bachelor’s degree in English, in 1992.
- She famously studied creative writing under late Pulitzer-prize winning author Toni Morrison, who has said on record that Scott was “one of the best students” she has ever had.
Who is MacKenzie Scott?
- Scott published two novels — The Testing of Luther Albright in 2005 and Traps in 2013. She won an American Book Award in 2006.
- Soon after graduating from college, Scott joined DE Shaw, a hedge fund in New York, where she worked for Jeff Bezos as a research associate. The couple soon started dating, and got married the next year, in 1993.
- In 1994, Bezos left DE Shaw and founded Amazon, which was then merely an online bookstore started from his garage. In their 25-year marriage, the couple raised four children together. In 2019, Bezos and Scott revealed that they were parting ways.
How did Scott become one of the wealthiest women in the world?
- As part of the settlement, Scott (then MacKenzie Bezos) received 25 per cent of the couple’s Amazon stock, which gave her a 4 per cent stake in the company — amounting to around $38 billion.
- Following the divorce deal, Scott’s name first emerged in the world’s richest people list.In January, Scott had sold, gifted or transferred around 1 per cent of her Amazon stock, worth approximately $350 million, according to a report by Forbes.
Scott’s philanthropic work
- In a blog post shared earlier this year, Scott made two big revelations — she announced that she was officially dropping ‘Bezos’ as her last name, and she also revealed that she had donated about $1.7 billion to a host of causes, including racial equity, climate change and public health.
- As part of her pledge to donate a majority of her wealth to give back to society, she shared a detailed breakup of how she divided the $1.7 billion between various causes:
Total given to date:
- Racial Equity: $ 586,700,000
- LGBTQ+ Equity: $ 46,000,000
- Gender Equity: $ 133,000,000
- Economic Mobility: $ 399,500,000
- Empathy & Bridging Divides: $ 55,000,000
- Functional Democracy: $ 72,000,000
- Public Health: $ 128,300,000
- Global Development: $ 130,000,000
- Climate Change: $ 125,000,000
Who are some of the other women billionaires on the list?
- Francoise Bettencourt Meyers, the sole heiress of the L’Oréal beauty empire, closely follows Scott on the list, with a net worth of $66.3 billion. Meanwhile, Alice Walton, the daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton, ranks 16th with $60.4 billion.
- The list also features Julia Koch, who along with her three children, inherited a 42% stake in her late husband David Koch’s chemical manufacturing company Koch Industries after his death.
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