MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon and Blue Origin’s founder Jeff Bezos, has donated two of her Beverly Hills homes for a total of $55 million.

This is not the first time that the philanthropist has made headlines for donating some of the fortune she initially received from her 2019 divorce from the self-proclaimed astronaut. In December 2020, Scott revealed that she was the one behind numerous donations made to dozens of colleges and universities across the US, part of nearly $4.2 billion she had given to 384 organisations in the previous four months.

Then in June 2021, she did it again. Scott—one of the richest women in the world—gave away a further $2.7 billion to 286 organisations. At that point, she also published a blog post explaining her attitude towards charity, writing, “We are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.”

And it certainly looks like Scott’s nowhere near done. The non-profit California Community Foundation (CCF) announced in August 2022 that the 52-year-old was giving up “two single-family residences valued at $55 million,” as first reported by the New York Post.

According to records, Scott transferred the two mansions—which she ended up getting in the divorce—to the CCF on 29 July. During her 25-year-long marriage with Bezos, the couple had bought the first residence in 2007 for $24.45 million, according to The Independent.

“The property sits on two acres, with the home being built in a Spanish style and powered by solar panels. The 12,000 square feet (1,115 square metres) residence includes seven bedrooms and as many bathrooms,” wrote the publication.

Then, on the same street as the first one, they bought a second house in 2017 for $12.9 million. “It measures 4,500 square feet (418 square metres) and was built in 1956. The two residences are situated along North Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills,” The Independent further described.

According to the New York Post, the CCF plans on selling the two residences, with 90 per cent of the money collected going to “affordable housing grant making.” The group’s immigrant integration programme will receive the remaining funds to “advance opportunities for the millions of immigrants from throughout the world who call Los Angeles County home.”

Scott’s current estimated net worth is $37 billion. She owns four per cent of Amazon after selling $8.5 billion in company stocks earlier in 2022. So far, she has donated more than $12 billion to charitable causes and groups—a number that will most definitely increase in the future.

Based in Seattle where she previously lived with Bezos in Medina, Scott is now thought to live in nearby Hunts Point where an unidentified buyer—widely believed to be Scott—bought a $37.5 million mansion in April 2019, some months after the highly publicised divorce was announced.

In March 2021, Scott married Seattle teacher Dan Jewett. “I am married to one of the most generous and kind people I know—and joining her in a commitment to pass on an enormous financial wealth to serve others,” Jewett wrote shortly after on the couple’s webpage for the Giving Pledge, a philanthropic organisation which encourages the world’s richest people to dedicate a majority of their wealth to charitable causes. “I look forward to the growth and learning I have ahead as a part of this undertaking with MacKenzie.”

On Tuesday 15 December, MacKenzie Scott, the world’s 18th-richest person, publicly revealed that she was the one behind the donations to dozens of colleges and universities in the US, part of nearly $4.2 billion she had given to 384 organisations in the last four months.

Scott, who was formerly married to the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (also known as the world’s richest person), has pledged to give away most of her wealth. Her shares in Amazon were valued at about $38 billion last year but would have gained value during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to The New York Times, Scott made donations to colleges and universities that many people have never heard of, and that tended to serve regional, minority and lower-income students. The money came after weeks of secret conversations between Scott’s representatives and college presidents who were interviewed about their missions, as several of the presidents revealed on Wednesday.

When they learned who was behind the effort, it was a surprise but it could not have come at a better time, when the pandemic was hitting their student bodies hard, they admitted. After Scott gave $50 million, the biggest gift the university had ever received, to Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black college in Prairie View, Texas, its president Ruth Simmons thought she had misheard and the caller had to repeat the number: “five-zero.”

Scott made gifts to more than a dozen historically black colleges and universities, as well as community and technical colleges and schools serving Native Americans, women, urban and rural students. Some of the college presidents said that Scott had put no restrictions on the funds, allowing them to determine how to use them.

The funds were delivered to Prairie View on 20 October, and Simmons said she had been permitted to start disbursing money immediately to students affected by the pandemic. Speaking to The New York Times, Simmons said she was initially asked to keep word of the gift confidential, yet argued that making it public knowledge would send an important message.

“I used to be the president of one of those big colleges—Brown University—and there, of course, it was quite routine to be in conversations with people about gifts of this size,” Simmons said. “But it rarely happens in institutions like Prairie View, and it rarely happens especially for the kinds of students that we serve.”

The Borough of Manhattan Community College, a predominantly black and Hispanic institution in Lower Manhattan, received $30 million from Scott. A sister school within the City University of New York system, Lehman College, also received $30 million. Morgan State University, a historically black university in Baltimore, was given $40 million, and West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah $15 million.

Scott’s latest gifts bring her charity to almost $6 billion in 2020, an impressive amount. In a Medium post on Tuesday, she wrote: “This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling. Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty.”

Of course, many other billionaire philanthropists have previously donated impressive amounts of money to schools but few choose to make donations to colleges and universities that many people have never heard of. To these institutions, a $20 million donation is the equivalent of several times that to a Harvard or Yale, and could have a disproportionate impact.

Scott does not have a personal connection to most, if any, of these universities, which could imply that she simply is conveying a message of support and inclusion to minority and lower-income students.

West Kentucky Community and Technical College said it would use its gift to help disadvantaged rural adults and students prepare for the workforce. Prairie View A&M is using $10 million of its share to create the Panther Success Grant Program, to help juniors and seniors who have suffered financially from the pandemic to pay their college bills. The rest of the money will be allocated to the university’s endowment, raising it to $130 million from $95 million, which would support things like faculty recruitment and undergraduate scholarships.

Scott’s generosity is an endorsement of the value of these schools’ students and what they are doing in striving for education—something that Bezos has never done before and will probably never do in the future.