Melinda's Making Her Break from the Foundation After All. Here Are Some Questions We're Asking
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They’ll need to change that sign. Photo: FocusFantastic/shutterstock
It’s one of the many strange realities of megadonor philanthropy: It remains that rare place in modern society where the very personal — divorce, death and inheritance, dynastic intrigue — can affect the lives of millions.
Nowhere has this been more readily apparent than at the Gates Foundation.
When Bill and Melinda dropped the bombshell about their plans to divorce back in 2021, the news upended the comfortable assumption, decades in the making, that the couple would remain a united front as they carried their sector-shaping grantmaking into the sunset. Now, roughly three years later, we have an answer to the question of whether the exes could work together at the helm of their gargantuan foundation: No, they could not.
Melinda French Gates’ departure from the institution that bore her name for so long (without the “French” and after Bill’s) was always a possibility, ever since foundation CEO Mark Suzman spelled that out in a letter to staff made public shortly after the divorce announcement. Much has been made of the pair’s two-year trial period, after which, if “either one of them decides that they cannot continue to work together, Melinda will resign as co-chair and trustee.” A year on from that, after pumping another $20 billion into the foundation, Bill told Forbes, “I think all the evidence I see says that we’ll be able to run the foundation together forever.”
But now Melinda’s out — and in command of an additional $12.5 billion to devote to her own philanthropy. Combined with her already prodigious $11 billion fortune, that sum could stand up a giving operation to rival that of French Gates’ fellow billionaire ex-wife MacKenzie Scott, giving that will center perennially underfunded women and girls’ causes. More news will be soon forthcoming on that front, French Gates says.
In the meantime, big questions are swirling around about how Gatesland will look now that Melinda is finalizing her philanthropic break from Bill. Here are just a few.
Can we now consider the Gates Foundation Bill’s personal fief? Or was it always that way?
Looking in from the outside, it’s always hard to get an accurate read on the power dynamics at play at any private grantmaker, let alone one with the size (and PR budget) of the Gates Foundation. But Suzman’s recent statement on French Gates’ upcoming departure made the extent of her break with the foundation crystal clear.
“Melinda will not be bringing any of the foundation’s work with her when she leaves,” the statement read. “We will be changing our name to the Gates Foundation to honor Bill Sr.’s legacy and Melinda’s contributions, and Bill will become the sole chair of the foundation.”
It’s easy to read between the lines. This is now what the cynics among us have always suspected it was — the Bill Gates Foundation.
That’s not to detract from French Gates’ clear influence (pivotal influence, one might say) on the foundation’s course. With Melinda as longtime trustee, the foundation deepened its gender equity funding across areas like birth control and infant and maternal health, as well as economic mobility, education and closing the global “data gap” on gender concerns. In 2018, the foundation launched a gender equality strategy for the first time. All the while, Melinda was getting more vocal about her philanthropy, especially through her 2019 book “The Moment of Lift,” where she spotlighted the lives of women she met through her work at the foundation.
In retrospect, the book also contained hints that all was not all right between the Gateses — including an uneven power dynamic in their philanthropy. For example, Melinda included an account of Bill’s resistance to letting her co-author the couple’s annual letter (he relented in 2015). “He’s had to learn how to be an equal, and I’ve had to learn how to step up and be an equal,” she wrote.
As Melinda fought to assert herself at the foundation, she was simultaneously carving out an independent platform for her giving: Pivotal Ventures, the LLC she founded in 2015 that now serves as her philanthropic base of operations.
Meanwhile, Bill continued to frame the foundation’s work in self-referential terms, even as he claimed Melinda was part of the process. From 2022: “I feel privileged to be involved in tackling these great challenges, I enjoy the work, and I believe I have an obligation to return my resources to society in ways that have the greatest impact for improving lives.”
Now, following Warren Buffett’s 2021 departure, and after Melinda French Gates’ June 7 exit, Bill Gates will be undisputed king of the castle.
What of the foundation’s other board members? Well, the power players who joined as trustees after Buffett left certainly play a role in the foundation’s governance, but my sense has always been that they’re primarily a legitimizing and stabilizing element, having come on board just as Gates’ longtime ruling triumvirate — Bill, Melinda and Warren — came apart. They’re impressive figures, but figures representing the status quo. What reason would they ever have, really, to cut against Bill Gates?
Will Melinda’s expanded giving for women and girls stick to familiar strategies, or tread new ground?
The big question on everyone’s minds right now is what course French Gates will take now that she’s on her own. She didn’t go into great detail in her initial statement, stressing only that “this is a critical moment for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world — and those fighting to protect and advance equality are in urgent need of support.”
With Melinda as co-chair, the Gates Foundation’s support for women and girls was wide-ranging, but like most of the foundation’s funding, it followed a traditional framework: top-down grants and impact measurements based on the foundation’s parameters.
At Pivotal Ventures, meanwhile, French Gates’ approach has been more varied. First off, it’s an LLC, and like the LLC funding vehicles of other prominent megadonors like Laurene Powell Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, the structure gives French Gates the ability to make for-profit investments and political contributions alongside traditional grants. According to the organization, it has already committed $1 billion to “expanding women’s power and influence in the United States.” (Note that global funding hasn’t been a major Pivotal focus yet.)
French Gates’ independent giving has also migrated some distance away from the Gates Foundation’s strategic philanthropy approach and toward something at the midpoint between that and the trust-based giving of MacKenzie Scott.
In a 2022 update to her Giving Pledge letter, French Gates straddled that line, embracing new philanthrosphere mantras — “I’ve also learned how important it is to ensure that the people closest to those problems have a role in designing solutions” — while also reaffirming older ones: “My approach to philanthropy has always been data-driven, and I think it’s important for philanthropists to set ambitious goals and measure our progress against those goals.”
At the same time, Pivotal Ventures personnel have sounded off in a very current way around things like trusting grantees, incorporating participatory elements in funding, and centering intersectional gender and racial justice.
As its nonprofit giving shapes up, Pivotal also seems poised to delve into heftier political giving. It’s also an election year, and one in which gender justice is on the ballot — often literally — as the repercussions of the fall of Roe v. Wade continue to play out. A program of sizable political giving for women’s rights in the U.S. seems likelier than not.
Does this (further) jeopardize Warren Buffett’s commitment to the Gates Foundation?
We’ve asked this $136 billion-odd question before. But it’s worth repeating, not just because the numbers are so mind-boggling, but also because the 93-year-old Oracle of Omaha is, as he himself put it, “playing in extra innings.”
Following Buffett’s “irrevocable” agreement in 2006 to make annual gifts of Berkshire Hathaway stock to the Gates Foundation, the understanding had long been that the majority of the investor’s immense fortune would end up there. Gifts from Buffett have fattened the foundation’s already prodigious coffers by a figure exceeding $30 billion (the foundation’s endowment tops $75 billion).
But if Buffett’s full fortune went into the Gates Foundation, its assets would balloon to over $200 billion. Add in Gates’ money and that’s well over $300 billion (!) in a foundation aiming to spend down fairly soon. That’s an entirely unprecedented and quite likely unworkable philanthropic prospect. The supposedly massive Ford Foundation, for comparison, has about $16 billion in its endowment and is not looking to spend down.
Roughly two years ago, reporting from the Wall Street Journal ignited speculation — unconfirmed by the investor himself — that Buffett wouldn’t actually follow through on his old pledge. Crucial to this picture are the foundations of Buffett’s children: the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation. Already, the billionaire has earmarked over $17 billion for them, expressing “delight” with how they are shaping up.
Late last year, Buffett added fuel to those speculative flames, stating that “My three children are the executors of my current will as well as the named trustees of the charitable trust that will receive 99%-plus of my wealth pursuant to the provisions of the will. They were not fully prepared for this awesome responsibility in 2006, but they are now.”
It’s still possible that Buffett will direct much of his wealth to the Gates Foundation. But that’s not as sure a bet as it once was. And while this is speculation, it’s not outlandish to think Melinda French Gates’ exit has further jeopardized the old understanding.
When Buffett left the Gates Foundation in 2021, he supposedly did so as part of stepping down from multiple roles he’d long held. But the timing, so soon after the Gateses’ divorce announcement, speaks volumes. Incidentally, so might an old quote about the Gateses from Buffett, from a Fortune profile circa 2008, that’s been bandied about this week. “He’s smart as hell, obviously,” Buffett said. “But in terms of seeing the whole picture, she’s smarter.”
To top it all off, there’s the not-insignificant fact that Warren Buffett has been, low key, one of the nation’s foremost bankrollers of women and girls’ causes — mainly through the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, helmed by his daughter Susie Buffett, which also happens to be the top provider of private funding to protect abortion rights in the U.S.
Then again, son Howard Buffett’s philanthropy has more in common, topic-wise, with the Gates Foundation’s traditional areas, and son Peter Buffett’s foundation infamously retreated from its sector-leading role as a women and girls’ funder. So who knows?
In the world of mega-billionaire philanthropy, change seems to be the only constant. Comfortable assumptions about where these titanic fortunes will end up are more than likely to be mistaken.
Perhaps that’s for the best. As French Gates wrote in her pledge letter, it’s absurd for so much wealth to end up in the hands of one person. But as long as it does, why shouldn’t she at least walk her own path?
