Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett have gifted about $100 billion to the Gates Foundation so far
- Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett have given about $100 billion to the Gates Foundation.
- Microsoft’s cofounder is the world’s seventh-richest person with a net worth of about $164 billion.
- Gates said his philanthropy hadn’t forced him to “order less movies or less hamburgers.”
Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett have given about $100 billion in total to the Gates Foundation so far.
The Microsoft cofounder and Gates Foundation chair revealed the scale of his philanthropy to the BBC on Monday. A fact sheet for the foundation shows it received a total of $59.5 billion from Gates and French Gates, who are now divorced, between its founding in 2000 and the end of 2023, and a further $39.3 billion from Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
Despite his extensive giving, Gates is the world’s seventh-richest person, with an estimated $164 billion net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
“I still have more to give,” Gates told the BBC. “I will give away the vast majority of my money; it’s my full-time focus for the rest of my life, and I enjoy it.”
As of Wednesday’s close, he’s two spots ahead of longtime friend Buffett, worth $148 billion, and three places above Steve Ballmer, his former assistant and successor as Microsoft CEO, worth $144 billion.
However, he’s significantly less wealthy on paper than Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, the top three people on the rich list, with respective fortunes of $414 billion, $255 billion, and $248 billion.
For comparison, Buffett has given nearly 57% of his Class A shares of Berkshire to the Gates Foundation and four of his family’s foundations since 2006. The gifts, based on when they were received, total about $56 billion, but the same shares are worth $189 billion today.
Buffett is 25 years older than Gates, meaning the technology pioneer is likely to have more time to distribute his fortune. Buffett, Gates, and French Gates established the Giving Pledge in 2006 to encourage the world’s wealthiest people to commit the majority of their fortunes to charitable causes.
Gates told the BBC that parting ways with billions of dollars hadn’t required him to give up anything.
“I made no personal sacrifice,” he said. “I didn’t order less hamburgers or less movies.”
Gates — who published a memoir this week titled “Source Code: My Beginnings” — has previously called for higher taxes on the uber-wealthy, saying people like him should be about a third as rich as they are. But Sen. Bernie Sanders needled him in a recent conversation about why he wanted to remain a multi-billionaire.
“How much do you deserve? Can you make it on a billion? Think you could feed the family? Probably. Pay the rent? Maybe,” the progressive senator quipped.
Gates owned about 1.3% of Microsoft prior to stepping down as a director in 2020, regulatory disclosures show. The bulk of his fortune is now in a holding company named Cascade Investment, which he funded with Microsoft stock sales and dividends.
Correction: February 6, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated how much money Bill Gates had personally given away. It was his, Melinda French Gates’, and Warren Buffett’s gifts to the Gates Foundation through 2023 that totaled $100 billion, not Gates’ gifts alone.