MacKenzie Scott is notoriously generous and notoriously quiet. The billionaire philanthropist, novelist, and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has doled out more than $26 billion to charity during the past few years, but has done so without much fanfare.
Now Scott is going back to her writing roots—she was trained under the acclaimed writer Toni Morrison, after all—and is releasing her new novel, Last Days in Two Nations, chapter by chapter on Substack. Noticeably, she’s opted to publish it on an open platform, and not through a publishing house or distributed by a major bookseller like, say, Amazon.
Scott married Bezos in 1993 before Amazon was officially launched in 1994. She played a critical role in the early days of establishing what is now the No. 1 company on the Fortune Global 500 list, including overseeing early operations, business plans, and contracts. Upon their 2019 divorce, she received roughly a 4% stake in Amazon.
Of course, we may never know whether her intention was to keep her first novel since 2013 off of Amazon, since she never responds to press inquiries and rarely shares her personal thoughts with the masses. (She does, however, sometimes discuss her philanthropic efforts on a blog for her philanthropic organization, Yield Giving). But it’s undeniably interesting that she would opt to publish a book and likely make nothing for it, although she’s got plenty in the bank.
