• Last year Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, divorced, leaving her with a fortune of about $36 billion, which made her the 13th-richest person.
  • In a blog post on Tuesday, she announced she donated $1.7 billion to 116 organizations over the past year.
  • She has also changed her name to MacKenzie Scott.
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MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon’s billionaire chief executive, Jeff Bezos, donated $1.7 billion of her wealth in the past year to causes including racial equality, LGBTQ rights, public health, and climate change, she said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Scott, who was previously known as MacKenzie Bezos, also announced her new last name, which she said was taken from her middle name.

Last year, Scott signed the Giving Pledge in a commitment to donate the majority of her fortune after her split from Bezos – the richest man – left her with a 4% stake in Amazon.

“Like many, I watched the first half of 2020 with a mixture of heartbreak and horror,” she wrote in a post on Medium.

"I began work to complete my pledge with the belief that my life had yielded two assets that could be of particular value to others: the money these systems helped deliver to me, and a conviction that people who have experience with inequities are the ones best equipped to design solutions," she added.

In her blog post, Scott listed a total of 116 organizations that she donated to. She also broke down how much she donated to various causes by category, the top three causes Scott donated to were racial equity ($587 million), economic mobility ($400 million), and gender equity ($133 million).

At the time of the divorce, Scott's Amazon stake was worth about $36 billion. Her fortune has grown to over $60 billion with a jump in Amazon's shares this year. Bezos' fortune has also skyrocketed, growing by more than $60 billion since the beginning of this year and putting his net worth at about $178 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Scott made her announcement a day before Bezos was set to appear for his first-ever congressional testimony in front of an antitrust panel, which has been investigating whether Amazon used its market power to hurt smaller rivals.