American author, philanthropist and already a billionaire Mackenzie Scott (50) is now the world’s richest woman with net wealth of $68 billion, says the latest Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Mackenzie, ex-wife of E-commerce giant Amazon’s CEO and founder Jezz Bezos, has secured the top spot in the index, toppling French cosmetics company L’Oréal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers who has wealth worth of $66.6 billion.
With the fortune, Mackenzie has become the 12th richest person in the world.
Own shares in tech giant Amazon has helped Mackenzie, a Princeton University graduate, become the most fortune holding women globally.
According to global financial market data provider Refinitiv, Amazon’s stock went up roughly 28% over the last three months and more than 90% so far this year.
The recent rise in shares of Amazon raised the wealth of Mackenzie along with that of her ex-husband Jeff Bezos whose net wealth is now over $200 billion, as per the Bloomberg Index, a listing of the world’s 500 richest people.
Another thing that helped Scott got the world’s top wealthiest woman is the amount of Amazon shares she received from the divorce settlement taken place in 2019 with the company’s founder Jeff Bezos.
From the settlement, she got a quarter of the company’s shares which was equivalent to a 4% stake with worth more than $35 billion at the time.
Now the richest woman Mackenzie is deeply involved deeply in philanthropic activities. She has so far donated about $1.7 billion to 116 organizations including four historically Black colleges and universities.
In 2019, she also signed onto the Giving Pledge initiative, founded by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates.
The initiative tries to motivate billionaire people to offer a majority of their wealth to charitable and humanitarian purposes. Source : CNN, Wikipedia
