Melinda French Gates is resigning from the Gates Foundation
Gates, one of the most influential philanthropists in the world, is resigning from the foundation that she started in 2000 with her ex-husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, with an additional $12.5bn for her work.
Melinda French Gates, one of the most influential philanthropists in the world, is resigning from the foundation that she started with her ex-husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
She said she is moving into “the next chapter” with her philanthropy and, as part of an agreement with Gates, will receive $US2.5 billion to commit to her work on behalf of women and girls.
Her last day of work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she is co-chair with Gates, will be June 7.
Mark Suzman, CEO of the organization, said its name is changing to the Gates Foundation, and Gates will be its sole chair. In a LinkedIn post, he said French Gates wouldn’t take any of the foundation’s work with her when she left.
The foundation, created by French Gates and Gates in 2000, is one of the world’s largest, with more than 2,000 employees and an endowment of $75.2 billion as of the end of last year. It is well-known for its work in global health, particularly polio eradication and tuberculosis treatment, as well as poverty and gender equality.
French Gates, 59 years old, and Gates, 68, have run the foundation as equal partners. They each have their own areas of interest, with Gates leaning toward medicine and French Gates focusing on gender equality. Their divorce, finalized in August 2021, shook the world of philanthropy, raising questions about the future of the foundation.
The two had agreed that she would resign with additional funds for her own philanthropic work if after two years following their divorce either one decided joint leadership wasn’t working. She had decided last summer to stay with the foundation.
French Gates’s announcement of her departure comes about three years after she and Gates said they would divorce.
“This is not a decision I came to lightly,” she wrote Monday on social media. “I am immensely proud of the foundation that Bill and I built together and of the extraordinary work it is doing to address inequities around the world.” Gates in an online post thanked French Gates for her contributions to the foundation. He said he remained fully committed to the foundation.
“I am sorry to see her leave, but I am sure she will have a huge impact in her future philanthropic work,” Gates said.
French Gates and Gates have given the foundation $59.5 billion, while Warren Buffett, who resigned as a Gates Foundation trustee in 2021, has given it $39.3 billion.
The two founders have worked with the public sector and used their connections with other wealthy people to attack problems jointly. They have sometimes drawn criticism from public-health experts for the large role their wealth has allowed them to play -- choosing which diseases to prioritize and how.
“All we do is we spend our money, and we share our opinions,” Gates told The Wall Street Journal in 2020. “We’re not making the decision at the end of the day.” French Gates, Gates and Buffett created the Giving Pledge in 2010 to encourage wealthy people to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes.
French Gates has a net worth of $13.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, while Gates’s personal wealth is valued at $153 billion. He is the fifth-richest person in the world.
In late 2021, French Gates published her own Giving Pledge, saying she would donate the bulk of her fortune to a variety of causes instead of just the Gates Foundation, including to the firm she founded in 2015, Pivotal Ventures, which makes grants and investments.
French Gates on Monday didn’t elaborate on how she would continue her philanthropic efforts.
Pivotal, whose goals include increasing the number of women in tech and running for public office, said it has invested hundreds of millions in organizations in the U.S. French Gates in 2019 committed $1 billion through Pivotal for gender equality.
French Gates, who has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and economics and an M.B.A., both from Duke University, spent a decade working at Microsoft, where she met Gates, before leaving to focus on her family and philanthropy. The two were married for more than 25 years.
She was initially publicity-shy despite her work at the highly visible foundation, only agreeing to her first major solo profile in 2008, in Fortune magazine. She pushed the organization to empower women and improve their lives, including focusing on family planning and reducing maternal and infant mortality.
“The strategies and the mission of the foundation are joint, but then we’ll take priority areas,” she told the Journal in 2014. “We can get more bang for the buck doing that. And we get more time to really learn deeply about the issues.” She represented the foundation among gatherings of the elite such as Davos and in frequent travel to developing countries. She wove the work of the foundation with her personal life, saying she and Gates would detour from family vacations to check on projects and using the example of her three children, each born three years apart, to underscore the importance of family planning.
The Wall Street Journal
