After finalizing her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, MacKenzie Scott ended up with a substantial stake in Amazon. She earned these shares through her contributions during the company’s early days, helping with business plans and contracts. Upon their divorce, Scott received roughly a 4% stake in Amazon, which amounted to about 139 million shares at the time.

Since 2020, Scott has reduced her stake by 42%, selling or donating around 58 million shares. Despite having donated an impressive $19.25 billion through her philanthropic platform, Yield Giving, which she founded in 2022, Scott remains worth more than $35 billion today.

Yield Giving has donated to thousands of organizations, focusing on critical issues including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), education, disaster recovery, and more. This fall alone, Scott has donated well over $400 million to several education- and DEI-focused organizations, many of which received the largest gifts in their histories.

Scott sees immense value in supporting individuals during their early, formative years. She often reflects on her own experiences, recalling how she had to borrow money from her college roommate during difficult times. In an essay published on October 15 to her Yield Giving site, she wrote:

> “It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible. Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give?
> It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”

After graduating from Princeton University, Scott went on to become a talented novelist, nurtured under the guidance of none other than Toni Morrison. In 2005, she published her debut novel, *The Testing of Luther Albright*, which won an American Book Award in 2006. Morrison described the book as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”

The $1,000 loan from her college roommate made a profound difference in Scott’s life, inspiring that same roommate to start a company two decades later to help students in similar situations. That roommate, Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, founded Funding U, which has provided $80 million in low-interest loans to about 8,000 students who needed financial assistance to pay for college, according to Princeton.

Despite the enormous impact she has made, Tarkenton remains humble when asked about how she changed Scott’s life. Their story stands as a powerful reminder of how kindness and generosity can ripple through generations, transforming lives and communities.
https://fortune.com/2025/11/16/mackenzie-scott-college-roommate-gave-her-1000-inspired-her-philanthropy/