Bill and Melinda Gates announced their split in May 2021 and divorced that August.
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A year and a half after Melinda French Gates resigned from the Gates Foundation, new tax filings show that she and her ex-husband, Bill Gates, opted for an unusual giving structure to the organization in her final year.
French Gates donated $502 million in January 2024—five months before her June departure—in what will perhaps be her final gift to the high-profile foundation she cofounded with her ex-husband in 2000.
Gates, meanwhile, gave just a fraction of that: $94 million to the trust that funds the foundation and $10 million to the organization itself. That’s significantly less than he had contributed in recent years, especially 2022, when his $20.1 billion donation became one of the largest gifts in the history of philanthropy.
The relatively small $104 million might have been because he wrote a big check elsewhere. Filings show that Gates gave $7.9 billion last year to Pivotal Philanthropies, his ex-wife’s entity, through a public stock grant in October. A Pivotal spokesperson confirms to Forbes that that gift represented the first installment of the $12.5 billion he pledged to contribute to his ex-wife’s “work on behalf of women and families” in her agreement to leave the Gates Foundation, as French Gates wrote when announcing her departure. He had not previously donated to Pivotal. A spokesperson for Bill Gates did not respond to requests for comment.
French Gates founded Pivotal in 2015 and launched its private foundation arm in 2022. The organization’s goal is to empower women worldwide, in part through work on reproductive rights and other health issues, and it has become her focus since leaving the Gates Foundation. French Gates, who is currently worth $29.3 billion, did not directly donate to Pivotal herself in 2024.
The couple divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage. Since then, French Gates has become a substantial giver in her own right, donating an estimated $3.6 billion. Together, Forbes estimates that she and her ex-husband have given away more than $52 billion over their lifetimes.
In May, Gates announced that he intends to donate the vast majority of his wealth by December 31, 2045, when the Gates Foundation will shut down. Given Gates’ estimated net worth of $103.7 billion, that will likely require a massive scaling up of contributions, rather than scaling down—meaning 2024 may be the last year the Gates Foundation gets “only” nine figures from its billionaire benefactor.