Bill Gates Makes a Multibillion-Dollar Divorce Payout
The billionaire and philanthropist has made a nearly $8 billion payment to the private foundation of his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, tax filings show.
Andrew here. Theodore Schleifer is reporting that Bill Gates’ foundation made a $7.9 billion payment to the private foundation of his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates.
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A $7.9 billion Gates divorce payout
Bill Gates donated almost $8 billion to the private foundation of Melinda French Gates as part of their divorce settlement, one of the largest charitable contributions ever publicly recorded.
That is according to a tax filing reviewed by The Times’s Theodore Schleifer, which shows the first specific financial terms of the couple’s high-profile split in 2021 followed by the separation of their charitable efforts in 2024.
Gates made the $7.88 billion donation in 2024 to a relatively new foundation started by French Gates called the Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation, according to the document.
Some background: When French Gates announced in May 2024 that she would resign as a co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she suggested that Gates would donate $12.5 billion to her own efforts to improve peoples’ lives. She said in a statement that “under the terms of my agreement with Bill” that she would “have an additional $12.5 billion to commit to my work on behalf of women and families.”
But the precise terms of their philanthropic split were not made public.
More money could be coming. Tax filings for 2025, which will not be public until later this year, could reveal the balance of the money that French Gates said would be committed to her philanthropic work — about $4.6 billion. It is also possible that some of that seemingly missing money was not given to a charitable foundation, but to an entity, such as French Gates’s limited-liability company, Pivotal Ventures, that does not file a tax return.
A spokesperson for Gates did not return requests for comment. Pivotal declined to elaborate on the discrepancy, but confirmed that the $12.5 billion agreement has been fulfilled. The nearly $7.9 billion donation, a Pivotal spokesperson said, was part of that agreement.
Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation is now one of America’s largest private foundations. Established in late 2022, the year after the divorce, it had $604 million on hand at the end of 2023. A year later, it had $7.4 billion in assets, after making under $500 million in charitable donations that year.