MacKenzie Scott has long tried to keep her enormous philanthropy quiet, but the scale of her giving keeps making a splash. Data provided to Fortune by Giving USA and the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy in June show that megagifts from American donors totaled $19.2 billion in 2025—and Scott alone accounted for one-third of that amount.

Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had her banner philanthropic year in 2025, when she donated roughly $7 billion. That brought her cumulative giving to $26.2 billion in just five years, distributed across thousands of organizations focused on housing, DEI, disaster recovery, and many other causes. Her single-year total exceeded the lifetime donations of most billionaires, according to Fortune's earlier reporting.

Other 2025 megadonors included Michael Bloomberg ($4.3 billion), Bill Gates ($3.7 billion), Warren Buffett ($1.34 billion), and Susan and Michael Dell (nearly $1 billion). These megadonors are part of a far larger philanthropic engine in the United States, where total charitable giving reached $617.2 billion in 2025—a 5.7% jump from the previous year—according to a report published by Giving USA and IU's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and released Tuesday. The total spans philanthropic donations from individuals, bequests, foundations, and corporations to U.S. charities—meaning that even eight- and nine-figure gifts like Scott's make up only a sliver of the country's overall giving, with the vast majority flowing from the broader donor base.

“It was a positive year for charitable giving, with virtually all categories of recipient organizations achieving solid or better growth at the aggregate level,” Gabe Cooper, vice chair of Giving USA Foundation and founder and CEO of Virtuous, said in a statement. The organization types that received the most funding included religion, human services, education, health, international affairs, and arts and culture.

A notable absence from the Philanthropy 50

Despite her extreme generosity in 2025, the Chronicle of Philanthropy did not include Scott on its list of the top 50 donors this year. The omission is due mostly to the quiet nature of her giving. Scott is notoriously under the radar with her donations, never personally seeking press coverage for her gifts and rarely offering insights into them.

“MacKenzie Scott is among the notable absences on the Philanthropy 50 list,” according to the Chronicle. “While it is possible she made gifts to her donor-advised funds that would have earned her a spot on the Philanthropy 50, she and her representatives declined to provide such information to the Chronicle.”

The disconnect illustrates how donor rankings work: lists like the Philanthropy 50 are compiled from gifts that donors or their representatives confirm, so giving conducted quietly can go unrecognized on paper even when it is historic in scale.

But Scott does not really participate in philanthropy for the recognition—and perhaps that is the point. Much of her giving was inspired by acts of kindness from her own past, including a college roommate who gave her $1,000 so she would not have to drop out, and a dentist who provided free dental work when he knew she could not afford it.

“It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible,” Scott wrote in a Dec. 9 essay. “The potential of peaceful, non-transactional contribution has long been underestimated, often on the basis that it is not financially self-sustaining, or that some of its benefits are hard to track. But what if these imagined liabilities are actually assets?”

Giving, she added, also simply feels good. “Generosity and kindness engage the same pleasure centers in the brain as sex, food, and receiving gifts, and they improve our health and long-term happiness as well,” she wrote.

A pledge steadily kept

Following her divorce from Bezos—who has donated far less of his net worth than Scott over his lifetime—Scott signed the Giving Pledge, the initiative launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in 2010 inviting billionaires to publicly commit the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. She has steadily chipped away at that commitment, but because of the Amazon shares she received upon the divorce, her net worth still sits at nearly $37 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.

Scott, who rarely speaks publicly, is now releasing a novel—though readers will not find it on Amazon.

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on June 25, 2026. This story was originally featured on Fortune.