Bloomberg Billionaires Index: MacKenzie Scott, who is a philanthropist and novelist but mostly known as the former wife of Jeff Bezos has jumped positions on Bloomberg's Billionaire index to emerge as the world’s richest woman. Scott, who toppled L'Oréal heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers to gain the spot, with a net worth of $68 billion. This also makes Scott the 12th wealthiest person in the world. ALSO READ | Facebook Suspends 453 Pakistani FB Accounts & Over 100 Instagram Accounts For Spreading Fake News, Anti-India Propaganda


After her divorce in 2019, Scott has held the spot of the fourth-richest woman in the world behind Bettencourt Meyers, Alice Walton of the Walmart family, and Jacqueline Badger Mars of the Mars candy empire.

Here's the world's top 10 richest people and their worth as on September 3:

Rank 1: Jeff Bezos: $207B

Rank 2: Bill Gates: $127B

Rank 3: Mark Zuckerberg: $114B

Rank 4: Elon Musk: $105B

Rank 5: Bernard Arnault: $87.9B

Rank 6: Warren Buffett: $83.9B

Rank 7: Steve Ballmer: $82.9B

Rank 8: Mukesh Ambani: $81.9B

Rank 9: Larry Page: $81.0B

Rank 10: Sergey Brin: $78.5B

Who is MacKenzie Scott?

MacKenzie Scott is a known American novelist and philanthropist from San Francisco, California. The novelist graduated has a bachelor’s degree in English from the prestigious US ivy league Princeton University.

Scott also took creative writing course and studied under famous late Pulitzer-prize winning author Toni Morrison, who mentioned Scott as “one of the best students”. Scott has authored two novels — The Testing of Luther Albright in 2005 and Traps in 2013. She won an American Book Award in 2006.

After graduation, she has joined DE Shaw, a hedge fund in New York, and worked as a research associate for her former husband.  The couple fell in love and got married in 1993.

In 1994, Bezos had quit DE Shaw to start Amazon, which was just an online bookstore then. Scott joined him as the company’s first employee. In their 25-year marriage, the couple raised four children together. In 2019, Bezos and Scott revealed that they were getting divorced.

How did MacKenzie Scott reach the top position?

In the divorce settlement with her former husband Jeff Bezos, she had garnered a quarter of Bezos’s Amazon shared in 2019. It translated to a 4 per cent stake that was worth more than $35 billion at the time. Bezos is the richest man in the world and retained voting control over Scott’s shares.

In fact, if you go by the reports in NBC News the upswing in Amazon’s stock that gained from $2,000 to $3,500 per share since the start of 2020, has helped Scott jumped the spots on the billionaires’ list. It is for the first time that the 50-year-old MacKenzie Scott overtook L’Oreal SA heiress Francoise Bettencourt Meyers to become the world’s 12th richest person.