Bill Gates commits most of his fortune to Gates Foundation, closing 2045

Bill Gates is donating virtually all his remaining fortune to the Gates Foundation, doubling the organization’s spending to $200 billion before it sunsets in 2045. It’s the largest philanthropic contribution in modern history, the organization said — and a shift in the foundation’s original timeline, which would have shuttered the Gates Foundation 20 years after the tech entrepreneur’s death. “There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people,” Gates wrote in a statement released Thursday. “That is why I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned.” The announcement comes as the Gates Foundation, which has given away $100 billion since 2000, marks its 25th anniversary. It’s also happening while countries across the world — from the United States to the United Kingdom and beyond — are cutting their aid budgets by tens of billions. Gates will now be doing the exact opposite, surging the foundation’s spending with a focus on much of what governments are stripping away: Ending maternal and child death, preventing infectious disease, and lifting millions of people out of poverty by improving education, nutrition, agriculture, and digital public infrastructure around the globe. It’s part of a growing trend at the foundation, which increased its spending to unprecedented levels — $8.74 billion — earlier this year. “2025 may be and is likely to be the first year of this century [that] preventable child mortality actually rises rather than declines. Where we see an increase in preventable deaths, in HIV, tuberculosis and malaria,” said Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman in a press briefing Thursday. “And so we want to do everything we can to offset that.” But he cautioned that philanthropy cannot fill the gap left by governments pulling back on foreign aid. “And so we're going to make as strong a case as possible to try and make sure that they come in and see that this is the highest-impact spending that any government can do, and we believe it has the full support of the vast majority of citizens in those countries,” Suzman said. The foundation — and Gates personally — have tried to make that case to the Trump administration and the U.S. Congress, with mixed results. Despite what Gates described as a positive meeting with the new U.S. president shortly after his election, Trump launched an all-out assault on foreign assistance, targeting many of the health initiatives Gates has championed for years. That includes Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a partnership that works to immunize hundreds of millions of children against the world’s deadliest diseases. Earlier this year, the Trump administration slated the U.S. support for that program to be eliminated — and in the president’s latest budget request, he proposed slashing global health funding by half. While Suzman said the decision to close the foundation was made a year ago — prior to Trump’s reelection — he added that aid cutbacks in the U.S., U.K., and other nations have lent a sense of urgency to the decision to close up shop sooner than expected. “It allows us to make sure that our funding will be steady, predictable, and reliable over the next two decades, at a time where there is, I don't need to stress, massive volatility and … massive political and economic headwinds in many of the causes that we face,” Suzman added. “And where we see many governments from the U.S. to Europe cutting back on international support, we are going to be able to stay steady.” Gates himself was more blunt in an interview with The New York Times about the Trump administration’s gutting of foreign assistance. “The reductions to U.S.A.I.D. are stunning,” he said. “I don’t think anybody expected that. Nobody expected the executive branch to cut PEPFAR or polio money without the involvement of Congress. What’s going on with H.I.V. research and trial networks, I didn’t expect that either. We will do our best to get these things changed. I will be an advocate. But those are real headwinds.” Gates co-founded Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, in 1975. Today, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranks the philanthropist as the fifth-richest person on Earth, with $168 billion to his name. Gates’ accelerated philanthropy will result in 99% of that wealth being donated to the foundation, Suzman said — a calculation that would leave Gates with $1.68 billion by the time he is 90. “People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them,” wrote Gates, who turns 70 later this year, in a post on the organization’s website This is a developing story. Check back for updates.