 "Bill Gates and his daughter Phoebe Gates arrive for the Time 100 Gala celebrating Time magazine's 100 most influential people people in the world in New York, US, June 8, 2022. File Photo/Reuters")
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is on the elite list of billionaires who do not plan to leave their entire wealth for their children. The three children of Bill and his former wife, Melinda Gates, will inherit a tiny amount of his fortune.
Still, even a fraction of Bill Gates’ wealth is more than a billion dollars. The 69-year-old previously called it a “mistake” to give all of his riches to his children, saying most of it will go to charity.
Let’s take a look.
Meet Bill Gates’ children
Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates have three children from their 27-year marriage. The eldest is daughter Jennifer (28), followed by son Rory, 25, and 22-year-old daughter Phoebe.
As per PEOPLE magazine, Bill and Melinda held off on their divorce until all their children had graduated high school. The couple separated in 2021.
The Gates children have mostly avoided the spotlight, with only Phoebe being considered a public personality among her siblings.
The three siblings attended Seattle’s elite Lakeside School, like their father.
Jennifer Gates Nassar earned a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University and a degree in human biology from Stanford University, reported PEOPLE.
She graduated from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in May 2024 and started her pediatric residency at Mt. Sinai.
A decorated equestrian, Jennifer married fellow equestrian Nayel Nassar in October 2021. The couple have two daughters – Leila and Mia.
Born on May 23, 1999, Rory John Gates is the most private of Gates’ children. In 2022, he graduated from the University of Chicago, achieving “a double major and a master’s” in just four years.
In an essay about him in 2017, Melinda described Rory as a “great son and a great brother” who “inherited his parents’ obsessive love of puzzles.”
She also said he was “compassionate and curious,” as well as “intelligent and well-read.”
The youngest child of Bill Gates, Phoebe Adele Gates, graduated from Stanford University in June 2024. She has an avid interest in fashion, having interned at British Vogue.
Phoebe founded Phia, a sustainable fashion platform, with her college roommate, Sophia Kianni. It is set to go live later this year.
She has been outspoken on social and political issues, including writing essays on gender equality for Vogue and Teen Vogue.
Phoebe is currently dating Arthur Donald, Paul McCartney’s grandson, as per Nylon.
Why Bill Gates’ kids won’t inherit all his fortune
Bill Gates has said many times that he does not intend to leave his entire wealth to his three children. He reiterated his stance on a recent podcast.
Gates’ children will receive less than one per cent of his fortune, which is pegged at $155 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. A per cent of this is $1.55 billion.
Forbes estimated the Microsoft co-founder’s net worth to be $103.4 billion, one per cent of which is still above a billion dollars.
In a conversation on the Figuring Out With Raj Shamani podcast last week, Bill Gates said that affluent families base their inheritance decisions on their personal beliefs.
“Everybody gets to decide on that,” Gates said, adding: “In my case, my kids got a great upbringing and education but less than one per cent of the total wealth because I decided it wouldn’t be a favour to them.
“It’s not a dynasty, I’m not asking them to run Microsoft. I want to give them a chance to have their own earnings and success.”
Gates said he wanted his children to be “significant” in their own right and not “overshadowed by the incredible luck and good fortune [their father] had.”
He added: “You don’t want your kids to ever be confused about your support for them and your love for them. So I do think explaining early on your philosophy: that you’re going to treat them all equally and that you’re gonna give them incredible opportunities, but that the highest calling for these resources is to go back to the neediest through the foundation.”
Gates previously told the Daily Mail that he would be gifting his children $10 million each, adding it would not do them any favours to leave more.
“I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favour to them. Warren Buffett was part of an article in Fortune talking about this in 1986 before I met him and it made me think about it and decide he was right,” the American billionaire said in a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ discussion in 2017.
Gates had announced at a TED conference in Canada in 2014 that his vast fortune would go to the family’s foundation – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charity.
Bill and Melinda Gates, along with a few other billionaires, created a Giving Pledge in 2010 encouraging the ultra-wealthy to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes.
Who else is doing this?
Bill Gates is not the only billionaire to decide not to leave all of his wealth to his children. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett told Fortune in 1986 that he would give his three children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.”
He still maintains they would not get an inheritance from his $96 billion fortune but would be in charge of donating 99.5 per cent of it. Buffett plans to give almost all of his wealth to charitable organisations.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also plans to leave the majority of his wealth to charity instead of his four children.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is also among the wealthy who say will prioritise philanthropy rather than passing down generational wealth. The former New York City mayor wrote in his Giving Pledge letter: “If you want to do something for your children and show how much you love them, the single best thing — by far — is to support organisations that will create a better world for them and their children.”
Philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, the wife of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, has said the billions she inherited from her husband would not pass to her three children with him.
“I inherited my wealth from my husband, who didn’t care about the accumulation of wealth,” Powell Jobs, the founder of the investment organisation Emerson Collective, told New York Times (NYT) in 2020. “I am doing this in honour of his work, and I’ve dedicated my life to doing the very best I can to distribute it effectively, in ways that lift up individuals and communities in a sustainable way.
“If I live long enough, it ends with me.”
With inputs from agencies