Every time a MacKenzie Scott grantee talks about receiving one of her multimillion-dollar gifts, there is always a hint of the same bashfulness, the same reverence, and the same glee.

Their eyes light up. They blush a little. There’s a giggle here and there.

“It’s disarming,” said Michael Lomax, head of the United Negro College Fund, or UNCF, from the moment you get the call from her team. It starts with a message of gratitude from Scott, who became a multi-billionaire overnight after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019. Then, the call pivots to a few logistics, and finally, the reveal of a large, generous gift that seems far too spontaneous to be true.

One surprising thing

I knew that MacKenzie Scott was a novelist, but I had no idea how far her lore went with her former mentor, the famed author Toni Morrison.

Once you begin to see Scott as Morrison’s mentee — rather than as a certain Amazon founder’s ex-wife — you can’t unsee it. As the rare writer-turned-billionaire, she gives more like an artist would, one source told me, than like the tech founders or old money heirs more commonly found in her class.

“Maybe this isn’t real. Maybe this is a hallucination,” Lomax thought when he hung up the phone with Yield Giving, Scott’s philanthropic arm a few months back.

But sure enough, when he finally found the follow-up email that, for days, got lost in cyber-purgatory, there it was. A gift from Scott, grantees say, is like getting a warm, fuzzy hug — only to find that when you pull away, someone’s slipped $100 in your pocket.

Or, in Lomax’s case, $70 million.

Since 2020, Scott has given away over $19 billion to more than 2,400 nonprofits that support causes like racial justice, education, and economic mobility. This year alone, she has donated more than $700 million to over a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, institutions that rarely receive major funding from other billionaire philanthropists and foundations.

As philanthropic grants go, this is major league. But what makes Scott unique in an age of impact reports and optimized metrics is not just the size of her gifts; it’s her strategy.

Lately, MacKenzie Scott has been thinking a lot about birds. In her most recent essay, she asks readers to consider starlings, who fly in egalitarian tandem, taking shape as they may, unsure exactly where they will land.

Scott wants us to be more like starlings: to give with the flow. If most billionaire philanthropists come across as paternalistic, dictating where their donations should go and how they should be used, then Scott prefers to humble herself as one in a flock of interconnected birds, committed to ridding herself of “a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change,” as she wrote in 2021.

Scott, it seems, believes that we are all fundamentally overthinking charity. If we could trust in one another enough to just hand over the damn money already, we could help a lot more people a lot more quickly. We will never know how many millions may have died from hunger or highly preventable health conditions, because solutions were slowed down by months, if not years, of billionaire wealth hoarding and bureaucratic red tape around giving.

Inside this story

• Eat, pray, give
• The case for vibes-based philanthropy
• How to give with the flow

“What if acts of service that we can feel but can’t always measure expand our capacity for connection and trust?” Scott wrote last month.

To be clear, Scott does not actually hand out multimillion-dollar donations on a whim. At Bridgespan, she’s got a whole nonprofit vetting team, which offers consulting services for philanthropists and nonprofits hoping to maximize their impact, on call. But it’s notable that she appears to want people to think she does. She constantly reminds us to romanticize the uncertainty that comes with handing out large sums of cash to the people and places you believe in, no strings attached.

“This is a very loving kind of giving,” said Lomax, one that reflects “the love we have for other human beings.”

And maybe, just maybe, this very atypical billionaire can teach us all something about how to be a bit more fearless in the way we give and in using our gut as our guide without expecting anything in return.

Eat, pray, give

Scott’s blasé, hands-off approach to philanthropy has naturally made her a kind of fairy godmother in the collective nonprofit psyche. The notoriously private Scott, who has not given an interview to the press since she was promoting her second novel in 2013, could not be reached for comment.

In the early years, some grantees didn’t even know who she was before they got the congratulatory phone call: “MacKenzie Scott thanks you for your work. Here’s $10 million. Do with it what you will.”........

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