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The pandemic forced everyone to shop online, so Amazon won big.

In 2021 alone, Amazon made $33.4 billion in profit on more than $469.8 billion in annual sales. So naturally, this enormous success made many billionaires, and no one is more willing to give their money away than Mackenzie Scott, who lives in Seattle, Washington.

Mackenzie Scott's net worth exceeds $37.1 billion, making her the 21st richest person in the country.

Who is Mackenzie Scott?

MacKenzie Scott is an American novelist, philanthropist, and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

She was born on April 7, 1970, in California. Her father was a financial planner, and her mother was a homemaker. She graduated from Princeton University with an English degree in 1992.

In 1994, she helped her husband, Jeff Bezos, start one of the most profitable companies in the world. According to the New York Times, "She was Amazon's first accountant and was involved in its transformation from a small online bookseller to the e-commerce behemoth it is today."

When Amazon became successful, she stepped back to focus on her family and writing.

She was involved in one of the most expensive divorces in history.

She married Amazon founder Jeff Bezos one year later and divorced in 2019. The divorce settlement was one of the biggest settlements in history. As a result, MacKenzie Scott received $38.8 billion worth of Amazon stock.

MacKenzie and Jeff had four children, and she closely guarded her and her kids' privacy. She later married Dan Jewett, a high school chemistry teacher.

She wrote her first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, at age 6 and her first commercial novel in 2005. The story was about a man who believed that he could engineer happiness for his family but failed miserably. The novel won the American Book Award in 2006.

She plans to give most of her money away.

In 2019, she pledged to give most of her wealth away.

She advocates a "no-strings-attached" giving ideology, meaning that each organization can use the funds as it deems appropriate.

She says, "I pledged to give the majority of my wealth back to the society that helped generate it, to do it thoughtfully, to get started soon, and to keep at it until the safe is empty. There's no question in my mind that anyone's personal wealth is the product of a collective effort and of social structures that present opportunities to some people and obstacles to countless others."

In 2020, she donated to 116 organizations focused on nine areas of need, including LGBTQ+ equity, climate change, public health, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the George W. Bush Presidential Center, and the Obama Foundation.

She hasn't stopped giving her money away. Last year, Forbes estimated Scott donated $8.5 billion across 780 organizations.