Giving Up Control

There is a version of MacKenzie Scott’s life that reads like a fable about the wrong kind of ambition. She studied creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison, who called her “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes.”¹ She spent ten years writing her first novel while helping her husband build a company that would become the most valuable retailer on earth. The novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, won an American Book Award. Morrison reviewed it as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”² And almost nobody read it. By NPD BookScan’s count, her books sold modestly.³

Then she got divorced, and the fable inverts. The quiet novelist who helped write Amazon’s first business plan became, almost overnight, one of the most consequential philanthropists in American history. Since 2019 she has given away $26.3 billion to more than 1,600 organizations, with no naming rights and no strings attached.⁴ In 2025 alone she gave $7.1 billion, a third of all megagifts in the United States that year.⁵ The woman whose fiction never found its audience has spent the last seven years writing checks that have reshaped HBCUs, tribal colleges, and grassroots nonprofits across the country.

The obvious reading is that she traded one kind of writing for another, that the novelist gave way to the philanthropist. But this August she published her first novel in thirteen years, and the way she published it says the two halves of her life were never in competition. They are the same sentence.

The novel she gave away

Last Days in Two Nations (A History in Eighteen Minds) is an 80,000-word dystopian political satire, serialized free on Substack in daily installments throughout August 2026.⁶ She announced it the way she does everything now, in a characteristically low-key post. She did not go to a publisher. She did not put it on Amazon, the company she helped found and whose early name, business plan, and first freight contract she helped shape.⁷ She gave the work away, the way she gives everything away.

That choice is the point. Scott’s philanthropy is organized through Yield Giving, a name she chose for a specific reason. “Yield is named after a belief in adding value by giving up control,” her website reads.⁸ Her gifts are unrestricted, which is to say she hands over the money and does not tell the recipient what to do with it. She gives up control as a deliberate method, on the theory that the people closest to a problem are the ones best equipped to solve it.

The Substack novel is the same philosophy applied to art. A traditional publisher is a gatekeeper; it decides what the public gets to read and extracts a toll. Scott bypassed the gate entirely, releasing the work free to anyone who subscribes. She gave up control of the distribution, the pricing, and the gatekeeping, and trusted the work to find its own readers. It is the literary equivalent of an unrestricted grant.

The Stoics would have recognized her

There is a two-thousand-year-old name for what Scott is doing, and it is not “philanthropy.” It is the Stoic doctrine of the dichotomy of control. Epictetus opened his handbook with the claim that some things are in our power and others are not, and he built an entire philosophy on learning to tell the difference, because the things outside our power cannot be the basis of a good life.⁹ The Stoics went further and called wealth, reputation, and even health “indifferents,” useful but not part of what makes a life good; the wise person uses them and is willing to let them go.¹⁰ Seneca, who was among the richest men in Rome, insisted that the wise person owns wealth without being owned by it, holding it loosely enough to give it away at a moment’s notice.¹¹

Read that way, Scott’s “giving up control” is not a management buzzword. It is the oldest discipline in Western ethics, enacted at a scale the ancients could not have imagined. She did not renounce her fortune, which would have been the ascetic’s move. She spent it, deliberately and unconditionally, on other people, and in doing so refused to let the money tell her who she was. The woman who helped build the most controlling institution of the modern economy spent her share proving the opposite thesis: that a person is most free when they are least attached to what they own.

The writer who writes checks

That Stoic frame sharpens the tension the popular accounts miss. Scott is a novelist who won an American Book Award and is known, in the public imagination, as a checkbook. But the Stoics would not see a contradiction. The novelist who spent ten years on a single book has the patience of someone who believes in long horizons; the philanthropist who moved $26 billion has the same. She gave up control of her money to community organizations the way she gave up control of her novel to the open internet. The through-line is not a retreat from writing. It is a conviction, held with unusual consistency, that the most powerful thing a person can do with what they have is to let go of it.

Morrison’s review of her first novel called it “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.” The same could be said of the way she has chosen to live. She helped build a machine designed to extract value, then spent her share giving it back. She wrote a novel about a father’s quiet interior life, then published her next one free, to no one’s gatekeeping and no one’s profit. The most interesting Stoic of her generation may be the one who decided, finally, that the best work she could do was to give the work away. Epictetus said that freedom begins when we stop treating what is not ours as though it were.¹²

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman

Notes