Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates will dramatically speed up his plans togive away most of his wealth, saying he will reduce his estimated $108 billion net worth by 99 percent over 20 years and prepare his eponymous foundation to stop operating by the end of 2045.
The plan, which Gates announced Thursday in a blog post, calls for the Gates Foundation to spend more than $200 billion in two decades — roughly double the amount it has given away since it was founded by Gates and his former wife Melinda 25 years ago, he wrote.
The couple divorced in 2021. Melinda French Gates resigned from the foundation in 2024.
The foundation was originally set to shut down several decades after their deaths, but will now close at the end of 2045, said Gates, 69.
“I now believe we can achieve the foundation’s goals on a shorter timeline, especially if we double down on key investments and provide more certainty to our partners,” he said.
The foundation will focus on reducing preventable child deaths, eradicating infectious diseases such as malaria and measles, and increasing graduation rates, among other goals, in its remaining years, Gates said. His announcement comes as the United States is scaling back its commitments abroad, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization.
Even philanthropic organizations the size of the Gates Foundation — one of the world’s largest — can’t make up the “gulf” in public funding emerging in the U.S. and abroad, he wrote.
The Gates Foundation is the last of an older archetype of philanthropic organization — similar to the Rockefeller Foundation — that centered on promoting science and trying to apply it to public problems, said Leslie Lenkowsky, an emeritus professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University.
Most foundations now take a more limited approach, he said. “They are not seeking to tackle big, wicked problems like world poverty,” Lenkowsky said.
Many philanthropic organizations instead give to institutions within their community or have political ambitions, Lenkowsky said. Others distribute funds to groups that then decide on recipients, a process that he describes as a “critique of the influence of people like Bill Gates identifying priorities.”
Partly because of its size, Gates Foundation has in the past courted controversy for its outsize role in public health initiatives and education, where it promoted the common core, he said.
Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2010 started the Giving Pledge, which encourages wealthy individuals to use the majority of their fortunes for philanthropic causes.
Buffett has also promised to give away 99 percent of his wealth, which is estimated at around $160 billion. Buffett has donated heavily to the Gates Foundation.
