Bill Gates has pledged to give away virtually all of his wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years. Citing in a post to his blog on Thursday that the Foundation has already given away $100 billion during the first 25 years of its operation, Gates said he plans to double the giving, meaning he will be giving away another $200 billion. The Microsoft co-founder and former CEO added that the Gates Foundation will permanently shut down on December 31, 2045.
“This is a change from our original plans,” Gates wrote on Thursday. “When Melinda and I started the Gates Foundation in 2000, we included a clause in the foundation’s very first charter: The organization would sunset several decades after our deaths. A few years ago, I began to rethink that approach. More recently, with the input from our board, 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.”
In Gates’s memo, he doesn’t mention President Trump nor Elon Musk by name explicitly, but he does call out the current administration’s actions targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“The United States, United Kingdom, France, and other countries around the world are cutting their aid budgets by tens of billions of dollars,” Gates wrote. “And no philanthropic organization—even one the size of the Gates Foundation—can make up the gulf in funding that’s emerging right now. The reality is, we will not eradicate polio without funding from the United States.”
Gates did go a step further in a new interview with the Financial Times, saying that Musk canceled grants to a hospital in Mozambique’s Gaza Province that helps prevent women from transmitting HIV to their babies, supposedly in the mistaken belief that the U.S. was supplying condoms to Hamas in Gaza in the Middle East. “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he told the FT.
Gates pays credit to another billionaire, Warren Buffett, who he says helped power the Gates Foundation during its first 25 years. Among the many successes over the years thus far include supporting the creation of a new rotavirus vaccine that helped reduce the number of children who die from diarrhea each year by 75%.
Going forward, the Gates Foundation will focus on three core areas: maternal and pediatric health, the eradication of deadly infectious diseases (particularly malaria), and the eradication of poverty through education with programs for public schools . “Frustratingly, progress in education is less dramatic than in health—there is no vaccine to improve the school system—but improving education remains our foundation’s top priority in the United States,” Gates wrote.
When all is said and done, Gates says he will have given away 99% of his net worth in the next 20 years. Citing Andrew Carnegie’s 1899 essay The Gospel of Wealth, Gates underscores the argument that the wealthy have a responsibility to society, perhaps radical at the time but maybe still radical in the current political climate.
“In the essay’s most famous line, Carnegie argues that 'the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced,’” Gates wrote. “I have spent a lot of time thinking about that quote lately. People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them.”
Rachel King (she/her) is a news writer at Town & Country. Before joining T&C, she spent nearly a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work covering travel and lifestyle has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Critic, and Cool Hunting, among others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York with her wife, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at @rk.passport.
