Bill Gates plans to donate $200 billion from his foundation — the largest amount a private foundation has ever given away.
Bill Gates said he will donate most of his $108 billion fortune to the Gates Foundation before shutting it down in 20 years. Rather than wait to sunset the foundation within 20 years of his death, Gates said he wants to accelerate grantmaking for the causes he has championed over the past 25 years, including malaria and TB vaccine development, HIV prevention, U.S. education and maternal and child health. Gates has been the sole chair of the foundation since ex-wife Melinda French Gates resigned last May.
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Bill Gates doesn’t want to die with more than $100 billion to his name. To accomplish that, the philanthropist said in early May he’ll speed his plan to give away the bulk of his wealth, along with future profits from his companies, to the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years. The plan is to spend out $200 billion — the largest amount a private foundation has ever given away — and close his foundation, Gates said.
Although Gates is one of the creators of the Giving Pledge, encouraging the ultrawealthy to donate the majority of their fortunes, preferably in their lifetimes, the accelerated timeline for the foundation’s closure is somewhat surprising. Previously, the foundation was scheduled to shut down within 20 years of Gates’s death. Now it is slated to close by December 31, 2045. The decision was made in consultation with the foundation’s Board of Trustees, the 69-year-old co-founder of Microsoft explained.
Sipa USA via AP
Melinda French Gates stepped down as co-chair of the Gates Foundation last year.
“There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold on to resources that could be used to help people,” Gates wrote in a blog post Thursday that also celebrated the foundation’s 25th anniversary.
The Gates Foundation has emerged as the biggest, most generous, and for some, most controversial philanthropy, especially in the field of global health. Since its founding in 2000, the grant maker has provided more than $100 billion for childhood immunizations, the development of malaria and TB vaccines, and HIV prevention, among other causes. The new plan calls for the foundation to double its spending.
Nonetheless, the closure of the Gates Foundation could unnerve nonprofits grappling with how to respond to the Trump administration’s near-total elimination of international aid and efforts to roll back funding for domestic causes such as higher education and affordable housing — areas the Gates Foundation has funded over the years.
Rather than contribute to that uncertainty, the foundation aims to help stabilize many of the foundation’s grantees, CEO Mark Suzman said in an interview. No other foundation has ever made a pledge of this size, he said, and he hopes it will spur more philanthropies and governments to invest in nonprofits.
“I think it’s a really, really big deal for philanthropy, for the world, for the issues we work on at a time when the world needs some hope and optimism. I am hoping that we can actually provide some of that,” he said.
Gates has been the sole chair of the foundation since his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, stepped down as co-chair last year. Gates has been hinting at plans to shutter the foundation and recently said he would leave less than 1 percent of his wealth (slightly more than $1 billion) to his three children, suggesting the rest might go to philanthropy. In 2022, he said he wanted to wrap up foundation operations within 25 years and more quickly fund work to eradicate or reduce the spread of diseases like polio. That same year, the foundation vowed to increase its annual payout to $9 billion by 2026, a nearly 50 percent increase over its pre-pandemic spending levels. The foundation is expected to spend $8.7 billion this year before reaching $9 billion next year.
AP
Warren Buffett gave $43.3 billion to the Gates Foundation from 2006 to 2024.
The foundation’s seven board members, including Bill Gates, had been discussing the 20-year sunsetting plan for more than a year, according to Suzman. The foundation has an endowment of roughly $77 billion. Together, Gates and French Gates contributed $60.2 billion to the endowment through 2024. Former trustee Warren Buffett donated $43.3 billion from 2006 to 2024. Gates said he will make up the difference between the current endowment and the foundation’s $200 billion spending goal with future contributions, including earnings from his Breakthrough Energy investment firm and TerraPower nuclear-technology company. Ultimately, the size of the gift will depend on financial markets and inflation, he said.
The areas the foundation will prioritize are consistent with its current portfolio. The foundation will continue efforts to reduce child and maternal deaths globally; in April, it helped launch a $500 million fund to support that cause. The Gates Foundation also will increase investments to prevent and treat the spread of infectious diseases, promote gender equality, reduce global poverty, and help U.S. children pursue postsecondary education.
Bill Gates and the Philanthropy 50
The Chronicle of Philanthropy began publishing the Philanthropy 50 list of America’s biggest donors in 2000 — the same year the Gates Foundation launched. Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates topped the list that year with a $5 billion donation to the foundation. The grant maker is ranked 18th on last year’s list, based on money Bill personally donated (not how much the foundation spends annually). Under his new plan to pour billions of dollars into the foundation over the next 20 years, Gates could rank much higher in coming years.
Separate from the foundation, Bill Gates wrote in his blog post that he will continue to support advances in clean energy and research for Alzheimer’s disease, which he called a “growing crisis here in the United States” that threatens to affect more people as life expectancies increase.
In the post, Gates was both wistful and ambitious.
“Today’s announcement almost certainly marks the beginning of the last chapter of my career, and I’m okay with that,” he wrote. “I have come a long way since I was just a kid starting a software company with my friend from middle school. As Microsoft turns 50 years old, it feels right that I celebrate the milestone by committing to give away the resources I earned through the company.
“A lot can happen over the course of twenty years,” he added. “I want to make sure the world moves forward during that time.”
Successes, Failures, and Navigating Trump
Like many private charities, the Gates Foundation has had successes and failures — and several have been outsize.
For example, the foundation has helped develop more than 100 health innovations, including the world’s first malaria vaccine. Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates were also co-founders of Gavi, an international immunization alliance, which since 2000 has helped save an estimated 17 million lives. Gavi has received $5.8 billion total from the Gates Foundation, more than any other group. The two were also among the founders of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which reports to have helped save 65 million lives, reducing the combined death rate from AIDS, TB, and malaria by 61 percent. The foundation has provided nearly $3 billion total to the Global Fund. Over the years, the foundation has also become the second biggest donor of the World Health Organization, which directs and coordinates global response to health emergencies like the Covid pandemic, and has donated $3.3 billion to PATH, a Seattle-based nonprofit focused on international health partnerships.
Some philanthropic investments have been controversial. The foundation spearheaded the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, which some critics argue promoted an industrial model of agriculture that poisons soils with chemicals and creates indebted farmers through the purchase of expensive seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. The foundation also largely funded a seven-year, $1 billion education initiative to improve teaching quality in U.S. low-income schools that was found to have largely failed to help students.
Currently, the Gates Foundation’s main challenge to its goals, and those of its grantees, may be the Trump administration. The administration has largely eliminated the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was a key partner for many of the foundation’s grantees; has canceled a $1 billion grant to Gavi; and has frozen funding to the Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria (which receives a third of its budget from the U.S. government). President Trump has also threatened to compel the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of progressive charitable organizations that refuse to comply with his demands to eliminate DEI and other programs that he opposes. In April, the Gates Foundation decided to change its college scholarship eligibility to include students of all races rather than only those who are Black, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, or Latino.
During a recent summit in Singapore — where the foundation will soon open a new office — Gates said he would “go to Congress to try and convince them to not be nearly that dramatic” on foreign-aid cuts, Alliance magazine reported. Suzman told the Chronicle of Philanthropy that the foundation continues to see opportunities to collaborate with the Trump administration and Congress as well as foreign governments.
Kirsty O’Connor / No 10 Downing Street
Mark Suzman says the foundation’s seven board members, including Bill Gates, had been discussing the 20-year sunsetting plan for more than a year.
“For our entire lifetime, we’ve worked with presidents and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and we continue to do that. We will see in coming months where the U.S. lands and where other countries land on their funding for initiatives like Gavi and the Global Fund,” he said.
In the meantime, the foundation’s new spending plan should provide some certainty to grantees, Suzman said. The foundation wants to be a “force for stability,” he reiterated.
Shutting down an organization as massive as the Gates Foundation will be a huge task. The foundation has 11,750 grantees and more than 2,000 employees worldwide spread across its Seattle headquarters and offices in Abuja, Nigeria; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Beijing; Berlin; Dakar, Senegal; Johannesburg, South Africa; London; Nairobi, Kenya; New Delhi; and Washington, D.C. Yet, Suzman said, in someday abdicating its place as the world’s biggest philanthropy, the Gates Foundation will open a door for other funders to step in.
“Bill and Melinda were always clear from the start that they wanted this foundation to be focused on today’s problems, today’s challenges,” he said. “We hope that tomorrow’s challenges will be dealt with by a future generation of philanthropists.”
Illustration: The Chronicle; Photos: AP, World Economic Forum
Maria Di Mento and Elizabeth Haugh contributed reporting.
Stephanie Beasley is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Philanthropy where she covers major donors and charitable giving trends. She was previously a global philanthropy reporter at Devex. Prior to that, she spent more than a decade as a policy reporter on Capitol Hill specializing in transportation, transportation security, and food and drug safety.
