MacKenzie Scott says her college roommate loaned her $1,000 so she wouldn’t have to drop out—and is now inspiring her to give away billions

After finalizing her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2019, Scott ended up with a load of shares she earned from helping to build the e-commerce giant during its early days, when she helped with business plans and contracts. Upon their divorce, Scott received roughly a 4% stake in Amazon, or about 139 million shares at the time. 

Since 2020, Scott has reduced her stake by 42%, selling or donating about 58 million shares. The philanthropist is still worth more than $35 billion today, despite having donated $19.25 billion through her philanthropic platform Yield Giving, which she founded in 2022. Yield Giving has donated to thousands of organizations, focused on issues including DEI, education, disaster recovery, and more.

This fall alone, she’s donated well over $400 million to several education- and DEI-focused organizations, many of which received the largest gifts in their respective histories. 

Scott sees the value of and need for support, especially during someone’s early, formative years. After all, she had to borrow money from her college roommate when she was struggling. 

“It is these ripple effects that make imagining the power of any of our own acts of kindness impossible,” Scott wrote of giving in an Oct. 15 essay published to her Yield Giving site. “Whose generosity did I think of every time I made every one of the thousands of gifts I’ve been able to give?

“It was the local dentist who offered me free dental work when he saw me securing a broken tooth with denture glue in college. It was the college roommate who found me crying, and acted on her urge to loan me a thousand dollars to keep me from having to drop out in my sophomore year.”

After graduating from Princeton University, Scott went on to become a talented novelist—a product of none other than Toni Morrison’s teaching. And in 2005, she published her debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, which won an American Book Award in 2006. Morrison reviewed the book as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”

Her roommate from Princeton saw the difference that the $1,000 gift had made in her life, and that inspired her roommate to start a company 20 years later that offers loans to low-income students without a co-signer. 

That roommate was Jeannie Ringo Tarkenton, who went on to found Funding U, which has provided $80 million in low-interest loans to about 8,000 students who needed help to pay for college, according to Princeton. Tarkenton still plays it cool, though, when asked about how she changed Scott’s life. 

“I’ve always said she would have graduated without that grace, as would probably a lot of the thousands of kids I help because they are hardworking people who kind of try to figure it out,” Tarkenton told Princeton Alumni Weekly. “But small graces everywhere add up—or big graces, when it comes to MacKenzie’s [giving].”