What the Gates Divorce Might Mean for Philanthropy—and What It Doesn't Mean
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Kjetil Ree, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
For the past two decades, the phrase “Bill and Melinda Gates” has become almost synonymous with big-donor philanthropy. That’s not only because the couple’s joint charitable project is a massive foundation. It is in many ways the massive foundation. With an endowment of approximately $50 billion, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation dwarfs all other U.S.-based charitable foundations, and thanks in part to a storied cash influx from Warren Buffett, it gives away on the order of $5 billion annually.
Size isn’t the only factor. With Melinda and Bill at the helm, the Gates Foundation has shaped modern philanthropy as we know it, modeling an approach to global health that has been groundbreaking and scientifically rigorous, but also largely friendly to systems of global capital. Along with Buffett, the Gateses have also set the tone for billionaire giving at large—both its triumphs and its shortcomings—via the Giving Pledge.
Now that it’s happening, the couple’s divorce isn’t completely shocking. Tales of tension in their marriage have come up from time to time, including in Melinda’s 2019 book, “The Moment of Lift.” Still, the couple’s outsized influence and the understandable tendency to think of them as a unit after so many years makes their impending separation quite jarring—more jarring, in the context of philanthropy, than the obvious parallel from two years ago, when Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott (then Bezos) announced plans to end their marriage. Scott and Bezos were also married for decades, but unlike Bill and Melinda Gates, their philanthropic record was pretty much a blank slate.
The Gateses, on the other hand, bring to the table not just two decades at the forefront of billionaire giving through their foundation, but also a variety of individual projects and growing philanthropic profiles of their own. Melinda Gates, in particular, has been ramping up her solo projects in recent years with a strong focus on women’s empowerment. And the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated Bill Gates’s public role shift from Microsoft founder to controversial power broker in the global health and development space.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about how the Gates divorce will play out, and we have no clear answer as yet to the biggest question: what each party walks away with. That’ll determine Melinda Gates’s capacity to carve out her own philanthropic project, which on its own could rival the largest foundations in the country. Many are surely hoping she’ll follow in the footsteps of Scott, whose no-strings, $6 billion in charitable contributions last year proved so groundbreaking.
Wherever Melinda and Bill Gates take their giving, this will be a story well worth watching, not just because of the fortune involved, but because these are two veteran philanthropists confronting uncertainties that are unique in philanthropic history, uncertainties that few of us would have envisioned for them only a few years ago.
Likely no drastic changes at the foundation
Having said all that, it seems unlikely the Gates divorce will spur any major changes at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at least for now. The pair indicated as much in a brief Twitter announcement, in which they spoke of a continued shared belief in the foundation’s mission and an intention to “continue our work together at the foundation.”
In practice, that means they’ll in all likelihood stay on as co-chairs of the foundation, one that has a very simple governance structure despite its massive size. In addition to the Gateses, Warren Buffett is the foundation’s only other trustee. It’s a family-and-family-friend arrangement one would expect to find at a small operation with assets in the tens of millions, not a $50 billion behemoth with 1,600 employees and offices around the world.
If at some point, Bill or Melinda Gates were to exit the foundation they’ve spent decades building, we’d have much greater cause to speculate about major changes. But as of right now, they’re staying put, and there is no evidence that their divorce will alter the foundation’s giving in any immediate and substantial way—especially if they’re able to continue working together at the foundation as exes.
The factor more likely to alter the course of Gates Foundation giving isn’t hard to guess. It’s the pandemic. The couple’s most recent annual letter, published on January 27, draws on the lessons of the past year to further justify the Gates Foundation’s longstanding global health mission. “The world now understands how seriously we should take pandemics. No one needs to be convinced that an infectious disease could kill millions of people or shut down the global economy. The pain of this past year will be seared into people’s thinking for a generation,” Bill Gates wrote in the letter.
Going forward, we’re likely to see the foundation lean even further into the kind of research and development, infrastructure-building and policy work on global health that has always been its forte, but this time, with a greater emphasis on preventing or limiting the spread of the next COVID-19.
We’re also expecting heightened attention at the foundation to issues of equity, not only because that’s where the sector as a whole is headed, but because that’s a direction Melinda Gates has been pushing in recent years. In the same annual letter, she wrote, “From AIDS to Zika to Ebola, disease outbreaks tend to follow a grim pattern. They hurt some people more than others—and who they hurt most is not random. As they infect societies, they exploit pre-existing inequalities. The same is true of COVID-19.”
The next MacKenzie Scott?
MacKenzie Scott touched on similar themes in the Medium post heard around the nonprofit world last July. “Life will never stop finding fresh ways to expose inequities in our systems; or waking us up to the fact that a civilization this imbalanced is not only unjust, but also unstable,” Scott wrote at the time. In the wake of her own divorce, will Melinda Gates chart a similar course, deploying her own billions in a way that diverges from norms that she and Bill Gates helped shape?
Despite their similar circumstances, relevant distinctions exist between the two women. We didn’t know much at all about Scott’s philanthropic interests and priorities when she and Bezos separated. The same is hardly true of Melinda French Gates. She may only be Scott’s senior by five years, but her individual interests and style as a major donor have already been taking shape for some time.
For Melinda Gates, the big theme is women’s empowerment. That became clear back around 2015 and 2016, when she penned her own section in the couple’s annual letter for the first time and started Pivotal Ventures, an investment vehicle she runs separately from Bill Gates. In the 2016 letter, she called attention to the idea of “time poverty,” and how women perform a disproportionate amount of the world’s unpaid work, a theme she has revisited in the context of COVID.
Melinda Gates began ramping up her press activity around 2016 as well, primarily around themes of gender equality and women’s rights. Her 2019 book “The Moment of Lift” relied in part on anecdotal depictions of the lives and challenges of women she met during her foundation work, often in poorer countries. Meeting those women “changed everything for me,” she wrote. It also changed the Gates Foundation, which launched a gender equality strategy in 2018, linking the foundation’s global development work more closely with women’s empowerment via issues like financial inclusion, land tenure and market access.
Fittingly for a funding vehicle founded circa 2015, Pivotal Ventures is an LLC and operates like one, choosing a variety of projects to “incubate” rather than running a more traditional program of nonprofit grants. Pivotal Ventures will likely remain the central hub for Melinda Gates’s ongoing effort to move $1 billion over 10 years to advance women’s power and influence in the United States, a benchmark that may tick upward once the divorce is finalized. She made that pledge in 2019 and cited three strategies: removing traditional barriers at work and at home, supporting women’s advancement in key professional arenas, and “amplifying external pressure” on companies and organizations to pursue reform.
We’ve seen that work play out in several ways recently, including via the launch of the Ascend Fund, which got started with seed funding from Pivotal. Ascend uses a nonpartisan funding approach to advance women in U.S. politics, backing nonprofits like New American Leaders and VoteRunLead that recruit and train women candidates for office. Another highlight of her work through Pivotal Ventures is Equality Can’t Wait, a grant challenge hosted at Lever for Change. Melinda Gates has partnered with none other than MacKenzie Scott to fund the ongoing challenge, whose grand prize was recently upped to $40 million.
Those looking to get a better read on Melinda French Gates would also do well to browse Evoke, a web platform she started that features stories by herself and other contributors around a variety of themes, with a heavy focus on women’s empowerment.
Disruption ahead?
In one set of those stories, Melinda Gates quotes the late writer Toni Morrison, who remarked that “historically, women are seen as naturally disruptive.” Gates writes, “We often associate disruption with Silicon Valley—but disruptive thinking is everywhere you find people challenging old norms and offering innovative new ideas for making our world better.”
A culture of disruption has not been the traditional norm in philanthropy, where women have long played leading roles as decision-makers, but within structural bounds set by husbands, fathers and other male relatives who “made” the fortunes involved. The Gates divorce, like the Bezos divorce before it, may further disrupt that norm. In one episode from her book, Melinda Gates casts herself as a persistent disruptor within the context of the couple’s annual letter, where she carved out an equal place over objections from her husband, as she tells it. Regarding their philanthropic enterprises, she wrote in her book, “He’s had to learn how to be an equal, and I’ve had to learn how to step up and be an equal.”
Only a few years back, the phrase “Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos” seemed likely to become as unquestioned a part of our philanthropic vocabulary as “Bill and Melinda Gates.” Now that both MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates will be operating independently, billionaire philanthropy looks well-primed for more big changes.
As of reporting from yesterday, $1.8 billion in stock has already been transferred to Melinda French Gates from Cascade Investment, Bill Gates’s holding company. Though Melinda’s current personal net worth isn’t known, any substantial fraction of the Gates fortune—now estimated around $130 billion—would net her more than enough to give at a similar scale as Scott, should she choose. And that’s not to mention ongoing grantmaking from the Gates Foundation, which isn’t slated for perpetuity and must spend down its gargantuan endowment within 20 years of its founders’ deaths.
There will be a lot more ground to cover on how the Gates divorce plays out and what it means for philanthropy. In the meantime, it’s worth calling attention, as others have, to the absurdity that the end of a marriage should send such massive shockwaves through this sector and others. It’s a troubling consequence of the extreme wealth disparities we live with, and the enormous weight private individuals can have over public life. But we’ve already seen that some positives can come from these big donor disruptions, even if the issue at hand is as uncomfortable and private a matter as divorce.
