Dana Scott

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

MacKenzie Scott Tuttle was born on April 7, 1970, in San Francisco, California, to Holiday Robin (née Cuming), a homemaker, and Jason Baker Tuttle, a financial planner. She says she remembers writing seriously at the age of six, when she wrote The Book Worm, a 142-page book that was destroyed in a flood. In 1988, she graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. In 1992, Tuttle earned her bachelor's degree in English from Princeton University, where she studied under Nobel Laureate in Literature, Toni Morrison, who in 2013 described her as 'one of the best students I've ever had in my creative writing classes'. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant to Toni Morrison for the 1992 novel Jazz. She also worked in New York City in an administrative role for hedge fund D. E. Shaw, where she met Jeff Bezos.

In Their Own Story

In 1993, Scott and Bezos married. The following year, they left D. E. Shaw, moved to Seattle, and Bezos founded Amazon with Scott's support. Scott was one of Amazon's early key contributors, and was heavily involved in Amazon's early days, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts and order shipping, and negotiating the company's first freight contract. After 1996, Scott took a less involved role in the business, focusing on her literary career and family. Their oldest son was born in 2000. In 2005, she published her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, which won an American Book Award in 2006. Scott said that the book took her ten years to write as she was helping Bezos build Amazon and raising her family. Her second novel, Traps, was published in 2013. Their community property divorce in 2019 left Scott with $35.6 billion in Amazon stock. After her divorce, MacKenzie Bezos changed her name to MacKenzie Scott, with the surname deriving from her middle name given at birth, which was the surname of her maternal grandfather, G. Scott Cuming.

Reader's Guide

Since her divorce from Bezos, Scott has become a major philanthropist. In May 2019, Scott signed the Giving Pledge, a charitable-giving campaign in which she undertook to give away most of her wealth to charity over her lifetime or in her will. Much of her philanthropy is organized through Yield Giving which she uses to distribute her wealth with an emphasis on trust-based, high-impact giving. In a July 2020 Medium post, Scott announced that she had donated $1.7 billion to 116 non-profit organizations. In December 2020, she stated that she had donated a further $4.15 billion in the previous four months to 384 organizations. Scott announced another $2.7 billion in giving to 286 organizations in June 2021. In March 2023, Scott announced an 'open call' for community-focused nonprofits. The result was announced on March 19, 2024, with Scott donating $640 million to 361 small nonprofits. As of the end of 2025, Scott had given away a total of $26.3 billion. In 2021, Scott married Lakeside School science teacher Dan Jewett. In September 2022, Scott filed for divorce, which was finalized in January 2023.

Did You Know?

• MacKenzie Scott wrote a 142-page book called 'The Book Worm' at age six, which was later destroyed in a flood.
• She studied under Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison at Princeton, who called her 'one of the best students I've ever had in my creative writing classes'.
• Scott was one of Amazon's early key contributors, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts, and negotiating its first freight contract.
• Her debut novel, 'The Testing of Luther Albright', took ten years to write and won an American Book Award in 2006.
• Scott made $5.8 billion in charitable gifts in 2020, one of the largest annual distributions by a private individual to working charities.