It almost seems like billionaire MacKenzie Scott has a magic pot of money. The more she gives away, the more she seems to have left. Call it abundance, luck, or the strange mathematics of billionaire wealth working in her favor. Still, no matter how far one goes, one should never forget where one came from. Safe to say, Scott remembers, and that reflects in her no-strings-attached way of giving to organizations that often know best what they need. MacKenzie Scott’s life is usually described through her accomplishments, a Princeton graduate who studied under the legendary Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, her first job at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, where she met and fell for her interviewer, Jeff Bezos, and the rest, as they say, is history. But that is not the complete story. In fact, those are only the rosy bits.
The author behind The Testing of Luther Albright has had more than her fair share of struggles, but owing to her incredible wealth today, that part of her life is rarely highlighted. The woman who is now a picture of wealth and philanthropy once took up almost every ordinary job that came her way. The 56-year-old did not hide this humbler chapter of her life. Her own Amazon bio listed a long string of college jobs that sounded nothing like the résumé of a future billionaire philanthropist from dishwasher, waitress, clothing salesperson, deli cashier, restaurant hostess, library monitor, data entry clerk, tutor, nanny, and research assistant to Toni Morrison.
It is safe to say that Scott worked almost any job that came her way without any qualms. Around 1991 and 1992, the federal minimum wage was $4.25 an hour. Full-time waiters and waitresses in 1990 had median hourly earnings of $4.80, including tips. Her data-entry or clerical work, meanwhile, could have placed her in a bracket where workers earned an average annual salary of around $16,000 in 1991.
Her money struggles of the past were very evident in her letters to late novelist Toni Morrison, as shared by Fortune. As a newly graduated writer in New York, Scott made ends meet by waitressing and making sandwiches, and the work left her far from fulfilled. She wrote about being exhausted by tiny, unpredictable bits of free time and worrying about paying rent with the “nickels” she earned. Scott wrote, “I guess the only way I will find out what will not work for me in life is by trying it,” she wrote. “I found myself with unpredictable and small chunks of time during which I either collapsed from exhaustion and frustration, or ruminated over the excruciating monotony of making and selling sandwiches, and worried about how I might pay my rent with the nickels they gave me in exchange for my ennui.” At one point, things became so difficult that, as a sophomore at Princeton, Scott’s roommate reportedly found her crying because she did not have the money to stay in school. Her generous friend, Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, arranged a $1,000 loan so Scott could remain enrolled.
It is hard to imagine that the woman who once lived through such a survival checklist is the same person who is still worth a whopping $33 billion, even after giving away more than $26 billion through over 2,700 gifts to nonprofit organizations and the contrast is staggering. In about seven years, Scott’s donation figure averages out to well over $4 billion a year, or roughly over $10 million every single day. In all likelihood, those experiences, along with being on the receiving end of kindness herself, helped shape one of the most extraordinary megadonors of the modern era, MacKenzie Scott.
