Melinda French Gates (born Melinda Ann French; August 15, 1964) is an American philanthropist, former multimedia product developer and manager at Microsoft, and the ex-wife of its co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates. French Gates has consistently been ranked as one of the world’s most powerful women by Forbes magazine.
In 2000, she and her then-husband Bill Gates co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable organization as of 2015. She and her ex-husband have been awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honour.
In early May 2021, Bill and Melinda Gates announced they were getting divorced but will still remain co-chairs of the foundation. She was recognized as one of the BBC’s 100 women of 2021.
About half of French Gates’s wealth is derived from public holdings transferred to her in May and August 2021, following her divorce from the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates.
These shares were previously held by Cascade Investments, Bill Gates’s holding company, according to company filings, and represented about 9% of the value of Cascade Investments’ total public holdings, according to Bloomberg’s calculations.
It’s assumed in this analysis that the same proportion of Cascade’s closely held assets were also transferred to French Gates in the divorce. The full terms of the divorce are not known and changes to the net worth calculation are likely to occur if more details on asset transfers emerge.
A representative for French Gates declined to comment on her net worth in October 2021.
Biography
Education: Duke University, Duke University Fuqua School of Business
Melinda Gates, formerly French, was born on Aug. 15, 1964. She was raised in Dallas, Texas and completed a computer science/economics degree and MBA from Duke University.
She was working at Microsoft as a product manager when she met the company’s founder Bill Gates. They married in 1994.
In 1996, she left the company before co-founding the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The group has granted more than $54 billion to humanitarian causes in the U.S. and developing countries.
She lives in Seattle and has three children.
French Gates’s first job was tutoring children in mathematics and computer programming. After graduation, she became a marketing manager with Microsoft, being responsible for the development of multimedia products. These included Cinemania, Encarta, Publisher, Microsoft Bob, Money, Works (Macintosh) and Word. She worked on Expedia, which became one of the most popular travel booking websites. In the early 1990s, French Gates was appointed as General Manager of Information Products, a position which she held until 1996. She left Microsoft that year, reportedly, to focus on starting a family.
French Gates served as a member of Duke University’s Board of Trustees from 1996 to 2003. She attends the annual Bilderberg Group conference and has held a seat on the Board of Directors of Graham Holdings (formerly The Washington Post Company) since 2004. She was also on the board of directors at Drugstore.com but left in August 2006 to focus on philanthropic projects. Since 2000, French Gates has been active in the public eye, stating “As I thought about strong women of history, I realized that they stepped out in some way”. This has helped her work become recognized while also shaping and delivering goals of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. By 2022, Bill and Melinda had given US$59.1 billion of their personal wealth to the Foundation. In 2015, French Gates founded Pivotal Ventures as a separate, independent organization to identify, help develop and implement innovative solutions to problems affecting U.S. women and families
