Jeff Bezos' Ex-Wife Accused of 'Making the World Worse' Despite Donating $26B: Elon Musk Says 'Sadly, Yes'

Elon Musk agreed with claims on X that MacKenzie Scott's $26.3 billion (£20.8 billion) in charitable giving is 'making the world a worse place,' a one-line endorsement that drew fresh attention to where her donations actually go and to Musk's own record on giving.

On 27 June, Pubity, a viral news account with millions of followers, posted about Scott's cumulative donations, calling her one of the biggest individual donors in history.

An account with about 22,500 followers using the handle @FrenlyOfficer, whose bio describes the user as a 'Heterosexual Alpha Male,' replied: 'Unfortunately, she's spending it making the world a worse place.'

Musk replied: 'Sadly, yes.' Neither he nor the original poster specified what made her giving harmful.

Where Scott's Money Goes and Why It Draws Fire

Scott received a 4 per cent stake in Amazon in her 2019 divorce from founder Jeff Bezos. Since then, she has distributed more than $26 billion (£20.6 billion) through her organisation Yield Giving, with a heavy tilt toward historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, Native scholarship providers, and groups serving low-income and minority students.

That focus is the friction point. As Fortune has reported, Scott has become one of the most visible backers of diversity, equity, and inclusion causes at a moment when corporations and universities are retreating from them under political pressure. Recent gifts include $70 million (£55.5 million) to the United Negro College Fund, and $40 million (£31.7 million) to the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

The scale sets her apart. Scott gave roughly $7 billion (£5.5 billion) in 2025, about a third of all the megagifts recorded in the United States that year, according to the Giving USA Foundation and Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. That outpaced Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett, and made her the country's single largest individual donor for the year.

Musk has spent years opposing that agenda. In December 2023, he posted that 'DEI must DIE', arguing such programmes amount to a different form of discrimination.

He has called diversity initiatives 'propaganda words for racism, sexism and other -isms.' His agreement that Scott's giving harms the world reflects that ideological divide rather than any dispute over the sums involved.

What the World's First Trillionaire Gives Away

Musk briefly became the world's first trillionaire on 12 June after SpaceX's initial public offering pushed his net worth above $1 trillion (£793 billion). His fortune sat at roughly $951 billion (£753 billion) as of 21 June. Scott, by comparison, holds about $40 billion (£31.7 billion), having given away a far larger share of her wealth.

Musk signed the Giving Pledge in 2012, promising to donate most of his fortune. His foundation held more than $14 billion (£11.1 billion) in assets at the end of 2024, yet it fell short of the 5 per cent minimum annual payout the IRS requires of private foundations in 2021, 2022, and 2023, tax filings showed.

A New York Times analysis found that much of the foundation's giving through 2022 went to causes tied to Musk or his companies.

He has framed his caution as a matter of doing good properly. On the WTF podcast with Nikhil Kamath in December 2025, he said: 'It's very easy to give money away to get the appearance of goodness. It is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness.'

Scott's model works differently. Her donations are unrestricted, meaning recipients decide how to spend the money, and the gifts often arrive without warning or conditions. Many of the 2,700-plus organisations she has funded had never received a sum of that size.

Melinda French Gates has pointed to Scott as a model for other billionaires.

In a June interview with Fortune, she said of quiet donors: 'People are maybe not always speaking about their grant-making, but boy, they are doing it behind the scenes.' Of the wider billionaire class, she was blunter in a December 2025 Wired interview, asking whether Giving Pledge signatories had given enough and answering: 'No.'