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Melinda French Gates no longer plans to give most of wealth to Gates Foundation, WSJ reports

February 02, 2022 at 12:39 pm EST

Feb 2 (Reuters) - Melinda French Gates is no longer pledging to donate most of her wealth to the charitable foundation she co-founded with her former husband and will instead disburse the funds among other philanthropies, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The 57-year-old Texas-raised computer scientist made the change in late 2021 following her divorce last year from Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The couple had pledged in 2010 to give the bulk of their fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was founded in 2000 and spent $55 billion in its first two decades, with a focus on combating poverty, inequity and disease.

A foundation spokesperson declined to comment beyond what French Gates outlined in her latest Giving Pledge letter, which she posted separately from Bill Gates.

"I recognize the absurdity of so much wealth being concentrated in the hands of one person, and I believe the only responsible thing to do with a fortune this size is give it away - as thoughtfully and impactfully as possible," she wrote. (Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Editing by Will Dunham and Tomasz Janowski)

Bill Gates

William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born 28 October 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, and inventor. Gates is the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen.

He is consistently ranked in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2014—excluding a few brief periods post-2008. Between 2009 and 2014 his wealth more than doubled from $40 billion to more than $82 billion. Between 2013 and 2014 his wealth increased by $15 billion, or around $1.5 billion more than the entire GDP of Iceland in 2014.

During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, he was also the largest individual shareholder up until May 2014. Refn | group = "lower-alpha" | Gates regularly documents his share ownership through public U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission form 4 filings. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates's maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix.Sfn |Manes | 1994 |p= 15 Early on in his life, Gates's parents had a law career in mind for him.Sfn |Manes|1994|p = 47 When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a Congregational church. The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock ... there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing".

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Cascade Investment LLC Cascade Investment LLC Financial ConglomeratesFinance Cascade Investment LLC is the private investment holding company of the Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Founded in 1995, the firm manages the personal assets of Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates, as well as the assets of his philanthropic foundations. Cascade Investment is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington.	Chief Executive Officer
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust Financial ConglomeratesFinance The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was formed in 1997 as the William H. Gates Foundation. In 1999, the foundation was renamed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust was created in January 2000 through the merger of the Gates Learning Foundation, which worked to expand access to technology through public libraries and the William H. Gates Foundation, which focused on improving global health. The foundation participates in preventive approaches and collaborative endeavors with government, philanthropic and not-for-profit partners. Priority is given to grants that leverage additional support and serve as a catalyst for long-term, systemic change. The foundation also provides funds to promote greater equity in global health, education and public libraries. Through their partnerships in communities across the US, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to raising the high school graduation rate and helping all students, regardless of race or family income. The foundation is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.	Chairman

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