Melinda French Gates resigns as co-chair of Gates Foundation

Melinda French Gates is cutting ties with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the $59.5bn philanthropic organisation she co-founded with her former husband 24 years ago.

In a letter posted on X, French Gates said she had decided to resign as co-chair “after careful thought and reflection.” Her last day will be June 7, roughly three years after she and Bill Gates announced their divorce.

French Gates also noted that, under the terms of a separation agreement, she would be receiving an additional $12.5bn from her former husband to support her own philanthropic work. In recent years, she has focused on the plight of women and families. 

“This is a critical moment for women and girls in the US and around the world — and those fighting to protect and advance equality are in urgent need of support,” she wrote, adding that she would share additional details about her plans in the near future.

In his own statement, Gates thanked French Gates and said he remained “fully committed to the foundation’s work”. The organisation will be renamed The Gates Foundation.

French Gates joined Microsoft in 1986, after graduating from Duke University with a computer science degree and a masters in business administration. She began dating the co-founder of what was then a fast-growing start-up about six months later.

They launched their charitable foundation in 2000, the year Gates retired from Microsoft, with a mission to improve humanity by reducing childhood mortality and eradicating diseases including polio. It aimed to combine their enormous wealth with the knowhow and urgency of the tech world.

The Gates Foundation last year gave out more than $7bn in annual grants, making it the largest US philanthropic foundation by many orders of magnitude. It was a major supporter of the vaccines that tamed the Covid pandemic.

Given the scale of its activities, the couple’s divorce announcement three years ago sent shockwaves not only through the foundation but also the wider worlds of public health and philanthropy. Their split followed revelations about Gates’s contacts with Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges that he trafficked under-age girls for sex — an association Gates has said he regretted.

The co-founders pledged at the time to continue to work together but agreed that, if they could not, then French Gates would receive a payment to support her own philanthropic efforts. They also moved to strengthen the Gates Foundation’s governance by creating a larger board with outside directors.

In 2015, well before their separation, French Gates launched Pivotal Ventures, an investment vehicle devoted to women’s causes. She also began to raise her public profile, speaking at the United Nations and later publishing a memoir, The Moment of Lift.

Mark Suzman, the Gates Foundation’s chief executive, informed its 2,000 employees of the “difficult news” on Monday morning, saying that French Gates had made the decision “based on how she wants to spend the next chapter of her philanthropy”. In particular, Suzman noted that she had been troubled by watching women’s rights “rolled back in the US and around the world” in recent years.