According to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, author and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott is now the richest woman in the world.
Scott, the former wife of the CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos, is worth $68 billion and is the 12th richest person in the world. She surpassed Francoise Bettencourt Meyers of L’Oreal for the first time, whose net worth is $66.8 billion.
After her divorce from Jeff Bezos in 2019, Scott received 25 per cent of his stake in Amazon as part of the settlement, which amounted to 4 per cent of the company. Amazon’s share price has increased by a massive 80 per cent since the beginning of this year, catapulting the wealth of Scott.
However, the 50-year-old Scott has emerged as a prominent philanthropist and has ensured that she uses her wealth towards the betterment of the society and towards charitable causes.
Shortly after her divorce, Scott announced that she signed the Giving Pledge, an initiative by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates that encourages the world’s richest to donate most of their wealth to philanthropic causes. In July this year, Scott announced that she had donated nearly $1.7 billion to 119 non-profit organizations that included four historically Black colleges and universities.
A student of the famed Pulitzer winning author Toni Morrison at Princeton University, Scott has published two novels: The Testing of Luther Albright in 2005 and Traps in 2013. For her debut novel, she was also awarded the American Book Award in 2006. She is also the founder of Bystander Revolution, an anti-bullying organization, that she founded in 2014.
Recently, Jeff Bezos became the first person ever to be worth over $200 billion, thanks to a massive surge in the share price of Amazon.
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