Before MacKenzie Scott signed the Giving Pledge and started on her path to give away her $36 billion net worth, she went looking for a paragraph in a book she’d marked up during her college years.
Scott signed the Giving Pledge on May 25, 2019, just months after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos left her with a roughly 4% stake in the company. But the billionaire philanthropist and author didn’t open her letter with talk of foundations or tax strategy. Instead, she leaned into her roots as a writer drawing a connection between literature and philanthropy.
She opened her Giving Pledge letter with a memory of pulling Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life off a shelf of her old college books, where she found a passage that she had “underlined and starred.” Dillard’s advice to writers was to not hoard your best material for some later chapter.
“The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now,” Dillard wrote, warning that otherwise, “you open your safe and find ashes.” Scott took the writing advice literally and applied it to her massive fortune.
MacKenzie Scott’s $26 billion philanthropic playbook
