The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, merging two earlier Gates philanthropies. The foundation deploys its resources through a trust-and-foundation structure, whose capital traces to Microsoft's 1975 founding and subsequent transfers of Gates's equity — a structure later augmented by Warren Buffett's 2006 commitment to give away the majority of his Berkshire Hathaway fortune. The foundation's mission centers on reducing infectious disease, improving maternal and child health, and expanding economic opportunity, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The foundation makes direct grants, equity investments, and program-related investments across dozens of program areas. In 2024 it dispersed more than $8 billion in charitable support, directed to initiatives spanning malaria eradication, tuberculosis treatment, agricultural yield improvement, digital financial inclusion, and K–12 education improvement in the United States. A substantial portion of its grantmaking flows through multilateral partnerships, including Gavi, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the World Health Organization. Its country offices include locations in Addis Ababa, Abuja, Johannesburg, New Delhi, and Beijing, and the foundation maintains a growing US$2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund that takes equity stakes in life-sciences and technology companies advancing the foundation's charitable goals. The foundation works with more than 2,000 grantees worldwide and employed approximately 1,800 staff members as of 2023. Its endowment — the charitable trust — is managed independently by Michael Larson through Cascade Investment, which has built concentrated positions in companies including Canadian National Railway, Waste Management, and Berkshire Hathaway. Melinda French Gates resigned as co-chair in June 2024 and received a $12.5 billion exit grant for her own Pivotal Ventures; Bill Gates remains co-chair alongside CEO Mark Suzman. The foundation's dual structure — a perpetually invested endowment managed like a hedge fund, paired with a grantmaking entity that must disburse 5% of assets annually — allows it to operate at a scale of influence rarely matched outside sovereign states. Its Giving Pledge co-founding role and close coordination with peer donors have embedded it at the center of global health architecture, from vaccine procurement to climate-adaptation funding.