Gates Foundation Adds $20 Billion to Its Coffers

When the news emerged last year that Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates were divorcing, the question of whether their foundation would lose ready access to its founders’ substantial resources quickly arose.

On Wednesday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation appeared to answer those doubts with an announcement that it will significantly speed up its giving in areas including global health, economic development, gender equality and education as its co-founders continue to pump money into what was already by most measures the world’s largest charitable foundation.

The foundation said it would increase the rate of its grant making from nearly $6 billion annually before the pandemic to $9 billion each year by 2026. To put that $3 billion increase in context, the Open Society Foundations, funded by George Soros and itself one of the nation’s biggest philanthropies, reported total spending in 2020 of $1.4 billion.

After promising last summer to inject an additional $15 billion into the group’s endowment, Mr. Gates said on Wednesday that he was making good on that promise this month, while topping it up with $5 billion for a total of $20 billion.

And there is likely more money where that came from. “As I look to the future, my plan is to give all my wealth to the foundation other than what I spend on myself and my family,” Mr. Gates, who Forbes estimates has a fortune of $122 billion, wrote on Wednesday on his personal blog, Gates Notes.

“I will move down and eventually off of the list of the world’s richest people,” added Mr. Gates, believed to be the world’s fourth-richest man even though he and Ms. French Gates had already given $39 billion to the foundation since 1994. “My giving this money is not a sacrifice at all. I feel privileged to be involved in tackling these great challenges.

https://tnewstimes.com/2022/07/13/business/gates-foundation-adds-20-billion-to-its-coffers/