EXCLUSIVE: Bill Gates Reveals How He And Ex-Wife Melinda Came Together For Blockbuster $20 Billion Gift That Makes Them World’s Biggest Givers

The Covid-19 pandemic, according to Bill Gates, remains “worse than people realize.” Ditto the Ukraine War, not to mention the economic downturn and “the political context where the willingness to think globally and do complex things, at least, feels like it's at a pretty low period.” Gates says all of this a day before he’s set to announce, in juxtaposition, one of the most significant donations in the history of philanthropy—$20 billion, which he’s transferring this month to the eponymous foundation he co-runs, for now, with his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates.

That donation brings the Gateses’ lifetime irrevocable giving to $55 billion, now making them the biggest philanthropists of all time. They move ahead of friend Warren Buffett, who has given away $48 billion, most of it to the Gates Foundation.

The real-world impact of this gift is huge: It means the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest, will now jack up its spending by 50%, to $9 billion a year by 2026; that’s more than the aid spending of all but five or so countries, per Gates’ math. “This is going to supercharge or accelerate, charge, turbocharge basically all the work that we do,” says the Microsoft cofounder, during an exclusive interview yesterday.

There’s significance here beyond another $3 billion each year going toward gender equity, disease eradication and infant mortality, among other causes expressly pursued by the Gates Foundation. It’s an eleven-digit statement about the need for the very rich to deploy their philanthropy more aggressively, rather than let it pile up so that generations of administrators can dribble it out for centuries under their name. “It’s as though they're trying to maximize how long their foundation can exist,” says Gates, “as opposed to, are there some high-impact things they can do now?”The spending surge reinforces the “give while you live” principle, epitomized by Chuck Feeney, the 91-year-old Duty Free founder who in the course of giving away more than $8 billion took himself off The Forbes 400 list to something close to broke. Rather than wait for his death, Gates now says he fully intends to give his way off the Forbes billionaires list while he’s still alive. (Thanks to this most recent gift, he drops one spot to number five in the world, with a net worth of some $102 billion sitting outside the foundation.) “I'll get myself out of the highly visible part of the list with just, say, two more gifts of this magnitude. I would get myself off the top part of the list,” says Gates. “Getting all the way off the list, that’s going to take me a while, but my direction of travel is clear.”

This $20 billion transfer also might be the most telling snapshot of the current situation between Gates and his ex-wife. The stakes are far beyond, say, the split between Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott—a clean financial break that has unleashed Scott to become arguably the most influential philanthropist of this decade. Because the Gateses comanage the world’s largest foundation, a driving force behind the Global Fund, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the pursuit to end polio, malaria and other diseases, the state of their disunion is a matter of international importance, especially since the couple sits in the middle of a two-year window to decide their collaborative future. If either declines to continue the status quo, Bill Gates will then fund her separate philanthropic activities.

According to Bill Gates, though, so far, so good. “I think all the evidence I see says that we’ll be able to run the foundation together forever.” He says he first consulted with her and with foundation CEO Mark Suzman about the $20 billion transfer three months ago, eventually bringing in Buffett and the foundation board. The economic tremors over that period did nothing to dissuade him of this course, in part with encouragement from Melinda French Gates.