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MacKenzie Scott alone accounted for one-third of America's $19.2 billion in megagifts last year
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MacKenzie Scott alone accounted for one-third of America's $19.2 billion in megagifts last year
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Elon Musk on MacKenzie Scott giving away $26 billion of her fortune: ‘Sadly,’ it makes the world a worse place
By Sydney Lake Sydney Lake
Associate Editor Down Arrow Button Icon
By Sydney Lake Sydney Lake
Associate Editor Down Arrow Button Icon
June 29, 2026, 11:25 AM ET
MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy gets criticized by Elon Musk.Scott: Dia Dipasupil—Getty Images; Musk: ALLISON ROBBERT—AFP/Getty Images
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MacKenzie Scott has become one of the most active philanthropists of our time. After all, she’s given away more than $26 billion during the past few years to thousands of organizations through her foundation Yield Giving.
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While many of her recipients had never received a donation of that size and many have called them life-changing gifts, not everyone sees her work in the same way. Take Elon Musk, who recently became the world’s first trillionaire, who thinks Scott’s giving is actually making the world “worse off.”
On June 27, Pubity, a major viral media and social news brand, posted on X about Scott’s giving, saying her $26.3 billion in donations has made her one of the “biggest individual donors in history.” The ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was recently confirmed as the biggest megadonor in 2025.
Then, an account with 22,500 followers with the name @FrenlyOfficer, whose bio describes them as a “Heterosexual Alpha Male,” replied to Pubity’s post about Scott, saying, “Unfortunately, she’s spending it making the world a worse place.” Musk then responded to @FrenlyOfficer agreeing with the sentiment, saying: “Sadly, yes.”
Musk is fresh off losing his history-making trillionaire status and is still comfortably the world’s most richest man, yet he’s been outspoken about how supposedly hard philanthropic giving is. After securing his $1 trillion pay package from Tesla in late 2025, he said philanthropy is difficult.
“I agree with love of humanity, and I think we should try to do things that help our fellow human beings,” Musk told Nikhil Kamath for the WTF podcast in an episode published in December 2025. “But it’s very hard.”
He explained that he thinks it is simply challenging to “to give away money well.”
“The biggest challenge I find with my foundation is trying to give money away in a way that is truly beneficial to people,” he added. “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. Very difficult.”
But Scott is revered for her no-strings-attached approach and trust-based philanthropy. Often, gifts from her come as a complete surprise to the organizations that receive them, and there isn’t as much red tape that typically comes with donations of her size.
Melinda French Gates has also been openly frustrated with her fellow billionaire class, saying those who previously signed the Giving Pledge—a promise for the ultrawealthy to give away the majority of their wealth—could be doing more.
More than 250 of the world’s wealthiest have signed the pledge, but many have so far failed to live up to it. One of those is Warren Buffett, whose son Howard has sounded downright Muskian in saying it’s “not so easy to give away money” if you want to do it right.
“Have they given enough? No,” French Gates said in an interview with Wired published in December 2025.
Although French Gates said there’s more to be done by billionaires in terms of philanthropic giving, she clarified that her criticism didn’t apply to all who signed the Giving Pledge.
“Okay, have those people actually been giving money? Some of them, yes, some of them at massive scale,” she said. “We are trying to demonstrate through the pledge that you can give at massive scale.”
French Gates also more recently credited Scott for her philanthropic work.
“We have the old adage, actions speak louder than words,” French Gates told Fortune’s Most Powerful Women editor Emma Hinchliffe in an interview published earlier this month. “I look back at the giving MacKenzie [Scott] has done in the last year. Look at what she has said about historically Black colleges in the United States and the importance of them. People are maybe not always speaking about their grant-making, but boy, they are doing it behind the scenes.”
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About the Author
By Sydney LakeAssociate Editor
Sydney Lake is an associate editor at Fortune, where she writes and edits news for the publication's global news desk.
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