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The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a nonprofit charitable organization founded by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his then-wife, Melinda French Gates. The foundation has donated tens of billions of dollars to issues like global health, gender equality, water sanitation programs, nutrition education and support, and more.
The Gates Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3) organization, partners with groups that can do impactful work on specific issues in specific areas — medical researchers studying mosquito-borne illness in Tanzania, for example — and helps ensure there is proper funding for the work.
The Gates Foundation is one of the largest such organizations, second only to Denmark's medical research-focused Novo Nordisk Foundation. Its size and scope noted, there is still much people wonder about the BMGF, so let's take a closer look at who it supports, who runs it, and just how much money we're talking about here.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was formed in 2000 as an offshoot of the William H. Gates Foundation, which the Microsoft founder created six years earlier. Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2008 to devote more of his time to the foundation.
Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates divorced in August of 2021, and she resigned from her position as co-chair and trustee of the foundation in the spring of 2024. However, despite the couple's divorce, the Gates Foundation is still very active and is even growing the scope of its operations and its endowment. The foundation has about 2,000 employees, and has offices all over the world, including several in Africa, Europe, and Asia.
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The former power couple aren't actually the owners of the organization. The Gates Foundation is owned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust.
The Gates Foundation is best known for funding efforts to eradicate diseases like polio and malaria worldwide and addressing global poverty and malnutrition. It works closely with global health organizations like the World Health Organization and UNICEF. The foundation has backed efforts like developing and delivering vaccines to poverty-stricken countries, supporting agriculture and reducing food insecurity in developing nations, and committed more than $2 billion to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, the foundation has also received criticism from global health and development experts, who have accused the organization of lacking transparency and accountability. Despite being a private, unelected entity, the foundation has had major effects and implications on public policy around the world, and its critics say it makes decisions based on the whims of its billionaire trustees rather than voters.
For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into agricultural development in Africa over the years via a "green revolution" emphasizing technological innovations in farming. Instead, multiple organizations have called the efforts a failure and urged the foundation to instead listen to the needs of African farmers.
Bill and Melinda Gates have also acknowledged shortcomings in the foundation's strategies. For instance, despite spending billions on improving the US education system, with the goal of boosting high school graduation rates, the couple acknowledged that the foundation's efforts to improve American public schools were "still falling short" and said the foundation hadn't accomplished as much as they would like.
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The foundation is well-endowed, largely thanks to donations directly from the Gates themselves and billionaire Warren Buffett. BMGF has also made some excellent investments over the years.
According to its website, the foundation has an endowment of $75.2 billion. Bill and Melinda Gates have given $59.5 billion to the foundation since its inception, and Buffet has given $39.3 billion since 2006.
The foundation has billions of dollars of Microsoft stock, which is little surprise given that the software company is the provenance of Bill Gates' wealth. Bill Gates' net worth fluctuates with the stock market, but it is well over $100 billion — and that's after subtracting the $76 billion Melinda Gates gained when the couple separated.
Notably, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does not give money to individuals, its website states, nor does it donate to "projects addressing health problems in developed countries," "political campaigns and legislative lobbying efforts," "building or capital campaigns," or "projects that exclusively serve religious purposes."
