Lady Business: The many, mysterious iterations of MacKenzie Scott

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 139th issue, published April 10, 2022.
 

Iterating

Hi! It’s been a while, for various work/life reasons. I spent most of the last three months, on and off, working on a feature in the new issue of Fortune magazine, with my colleague Emma Hinchliffe. The story’s subject is MacKenzie Scott, the woman who has in less than two years made all sorts of headlines for her groundbreaking, generous, secretive, consistently surprising philanthropy.
 
It’s hard to overstate how much Scott is outspending her billionaire peers, even when compensating for her unwillingness to share details. These stats are in the article, but: In June 2021, Scott announced that she’d distributed $2.7 billion to nonprofits over the past six months. That sum alone would have made her the third-most-generous philanthropist in the United States in 2021—and then she went on to give away another $4 billion in the next eight months. 

In comparison, the country’s top 50 donors gave a median of $101 million in 2021. Yes, $101 million. Yes, there are currently more than 700 billionaires in this country. 
 
Also:
 

She’s done all this largely as Sarah Bellamy experienced it—Scott’s emissaries appearing out of nowhere with a huge check, without strings or fanfare, then vanishing. She is giving massive chunks of her wealth away with blistering speed, to organizations long overlooked by more established donors, and without the ponderous apparatus of a big foundation. This is all revolutionary in a field in which mega-donations usually come complete with press releases, restrictions, expectations. 

Of course, anything that you work on for three months is going to evolve and iterate over that time. (Like when you’ve written what you think is the final final draft, and then—six days before the issue ships!—the subject publishes something that forces yet another rewrite.) 
 
But all of that is pretty appropriate given the constant change, and iteration, at the heart of what MacKenzie Scott is doing for and to billionaire philanthropy. Although this line didn’t survive our article’s final iteration, this comparison was one of the first images that came to me as I started writing:
 

Over the past two years, Scott has also been unusually willing to quickly change course, to an extent that’s more common among tech entrepreneurs than traditional philanthropists. It’s reminiscent of her earlier life, in which she played a supporting but crucial role building Amazon into the controversial behemoth it is today. That company didn’t reinvent the wheel of traditional retail so much as optimize it, with high-tech speed and enormous volume and fewer restrictions on what it was willing to do—all maneuvers in Scott’s new playbook.

 
Some of the comments on the article since it was published have been of the “she’s so great; why are you criticizing her secrecy” variety. Both things can be valid, right? One person can choose to buck the trends of her ultra-wealthy peers and start giving away her Amazon fortune as quickly as possible, at a time when most billionaires (including Scott’s Amazon founder ex-husband) are … not doing that. AND the fact that Scott can come out of nowhere to do this, set all sorts of high bars for scale and speed of giving, publicly agonize over how transparent she wants to be, and consistently refuse to provide a better avenue for people to apply for her money can maybe highlight some systemic problems with wealth and philanthropy in this country! 

“She holds such power,” Elizabeth Dale, a Seattle University associate professor who studies women and philanthropy, told me. But there has to be “a balance between having great wealth—and having some kind of accountability.” 

Put another way: If you agree with how MacKenzie Scott is spending her money, do you agree with how Charles Koch is spending his? (Or vice versa?) They have more in common than you might think! 

And yes, Scott is trying a lot harder to be public about her intentions, if not her methods, than Koch—but only because she’s choosing to be. If she decided to swerve tomorrow and spend all her money on, say, anti-unionizing efforts, there would be nothing stopping her. She also wouldn’t have to do a thing to disclose any change in charitable focus—as peers like Elon Musk have amply demonstrated.

Those systemic problems aren’t on Scott—or any individual!—to single-handedly solve. But they do raise questions about the nature of her power. She’s been more willing than most billionaires to acknowledge and reckon with these questions—at least up to her own comfort level and within the limits she sets, in her one-way communications through semi-annual essays. Could she do even more good by being more public about her giving methods, processes, and intentions?

It’s a question I would genuinely enjoy discussing with Scott, were she ever to give interviews (as it is, given her team’s usual silence, they sent me the most exciting “decline to comment” email of my career). But, as our piece acknowledges, even her limited transparency and unusual willingness to iterate in public is having a significant impact:
 

“It would be easy to say, ‘This is too much work. This is too hard. I don’t like this criticism.’ And I really applaud the fact that she keeps going.” Dale says. After all, “we don’t talk about the hundreds of billionaires who aren’t giving a lot away.” 

Lady Bits

 
—For yet more MacKenzie Scott, the New York Times went deep into her personal history this weekend. (Is there a journalism-focused German word for “the relief of realizing that your feature published first?”)
 
—I’m excited to see my December cover story with Emma, on 2021’s breakthroughs for female founders, named a finalist for business feature reporting in the Deadline Club’s awards.
 
—I finally saw Passing a couple of weeks ago and am still thinking about it; among many other recommendations, it’s one of the most beautifully composed films I’ve watched in quite a long time. 
 
—I will always be Team Repressed Yearning over Team Explicit Porn, so of course I enjoyed the second season of Bridgerton so much more than its buzzier debut. I was also pleasantly surprised by how thoughtfully it told a story about grief, and not just as a plot obstacle to the hero’s happily ever after. That wasn’t exactly the nuance I was expecting from the ridiculous rom-com fantasy that also gave us Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know”: The Extra-Angsty Violin Cover.
 
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