Melinda French Gates had been seething for a long time. She had been seething about the unequal nature of her marriage to a man heralded globally as a technology genius and trailblazing philanthropist. She had been seething about his infidelity. She had been seething about her yearslong slog to establish a foothold at the top of the foundation that, until 2024, bore her name. And she had been seething about the plight of women around the world, seeing in their vulnerability something of her own.
“I have rage,” she wrote in her first book, The Moment of Lift, adding that it was up to her to metabolize that rage into fuel to spur her philanthropic work. Published in April 2019, the book is a mashup of memoir and manifesto, a sort of coming-out party for French Gates, cementing her identity as a feminist and an empathetic advocate of women’s rights and gender equality. Written in unadorned and accessible prose, the book is a summary of the themes she has spoken about over the years. Its central argument is that the uplift of women is good for all of society. She also uses the platform to recount her journey from trying to fit in to living her values, share stories about the experiences of women she had met during her travels, highlight the female friendships that sustained her, and state her commitment to correcting gender imbalances. Gates called her book “wise, honest and beautifully written.”1
Just over two years after the book’s publication, on May 3, 2021, she and Gates announced their divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences.” French Gates crafted a masterful narrative about the unraveling of her marriage, about how she had given it her all, only to be disappointed by a pattern of behavior by Gates that led to a breakdown of trust and pushed her to seek a divorce. She said as much as she left unsaid, implicating her ex-husband through her silence. Her voice, although vulnerable, was not one of victimhood. It was one of empowerment, strength, and dignity that turned personal history into feminist idiom. Cicatrizing in the public eye was part of the plan.
Marriages are phantasmagorias. They change shape, they confound, they bewilder. Sometimes, they start out sturdy as a tree trunk and end up fragile as splinters. At other times, they are stitched together for convenience, with the seams showing. People enter marriages hoping that the formal bond will seal existing cracks in relationships. Many in the Gates universe—those who knew Gates in his bachelor days, those who were guests at the wedding, those who worked individually with Gates and French Gates at the foundation, and those who had the opportunity to discuss aspects of the relationship with the two central characters—suggest their marriage existed in the somewhat indeterminate spaces between those possibilities. An uncoupling surprised few of them.
Celebrity divorces have always captivated people, especially as tawdry details tumble out of the closet, but billionaire divorces have become their own category, partly because of the high-profile nature of some of the people involved but also because of the sheer enormity of the assets at stake, the wide-ranging implications for the companies they founded, and for philanthropy. The 2019 split between Bezos and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Scott, happened amid a scandal involving the Amazon founder and his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez, whose brother had leaked the story of their affair to a tabloid. Amazon shareholders may have been titillated, but they were more concerned about the implications the divorce had on the company’s shares, worried that the division of assets could affect Bezos’s control of the company. The former couple held about 16 percent of Amazon, worth about $140 billion at the time of the divorce, and Bezos was its largest shareholder. He now owns under 10 percent, while Scott left with a 4-percent stake. Since the divorce, Scott has emerged as one of the world’s most prolific philanthropists, taking a low profile and unfussy approach to grant-making. When the casino mogul Steve Wynn divorced from his wife Elaine Wynn in 2010, they each retained an equal stake in Wynn Resorts, but the split—which started out amicably—turned acrimonious when Elaine was pushed off the board. Bill Gross, the bond fund manager, fought his ex-wife Sue for ownership of their Picasso and their three cats. He lost. When Ken Griffin, the billionaire hedge fund manager, got divorced from Anne Dias Griffin, the two fought in court over the details of their prenuptial agreement and the custody of their children. In a sign of how much billionaire divorces had caught the public imagination, Apple TV ran a comedy series in 2022 called Loot, in which the actress Maya Rudolph plays Molly Novak, a 45-year-old woman whose divorce has left her with an $87 billion fortune. She stumbles around at first in a whirl of self-loathing, but eventually finds a role for herself at the charitable foundation set up in her name, also finding herself in the process. Putting aside the shortcomings of the plot, Loot caricatures the mega-rich and has a topical, ripped-from-the-headlines feel, given the rise to philanthropic prominence of Scott and French Gates.
But the breakup of Gates and French Gates went far beyond assets, or the fate of a single company. They were the twin suns around which not just the Gates Foundation, but much of the philanthropy world, orbited. Their coupledom was woven into the origin story of the foundation, a multimedia version of which is permanently displayed for visitors to the Seattle campus. In 1993, as a young couple engaged to be married, they took a safari trip to Africa. Gates didn’t believe in vacations in those years but his wife-to-be forced him to take one. A widely shared photograph of that first trip shows the two sitting in a safari van, Gates in a black T-shirt with his oversized glasses and floppy hair and French Gates dressed in neutral colors. Both are smiling. However, the bleached gold of the savanna and the crystalline blue waters of Zanzibar would soon lose their allure as they encountered the region’s extreme poverty. The level of destitution was unfathomable to two young Americans who grew up in cloistered upper-middle-class homes—especially for Gates, who until then had paid little attention to the world beyond Microsoft. They were dumbfounded to learn that thousands of people in developing countries died each year of easily preventable diseases because they didn’t have access to vaccines. They were appalled after reading health data cited in the 1993 World Development Report, which contained the global statistics on poverty and other data on the plight of the world’s poor that provided written proof of what they had seen. Another piece of the foundation’s origin story, documented on its website, is a PDF of an article Gates sent his father, Bill Gates Sr., in 1997 about water-borne illnesses, accompanied by a seven-word note saying, “Dad, maybe we can do something about this.” Gates and French Gates often talked about these early experiences and how, as they read about preventable illnesses like diarrhea and rotavirus that killed scores of children in poor countries, they began to see an opportunity for their money to make a difference.
Over the decades, they portrayed themselves as a complementary pair—he the technical maven, she the intuitive counterpoint. If Gates spoke in statistics and numbers, she conveyed the emotional sucker punch of seeing destitution firsthand. Each also spoke about the other in the press periodically, bewitching audiences with carefully selected tidbits. French Gates often talked about how she insisted that Gates and their children help with the dishes, or how her ex-husband set an example for other dads by driving their children to school. Polls regularly listed them among the most powerful, the most inspiring, and the most admired couples in the world as they moved about like royalty in their philanthropic quests. Their relationship was so important to the stability of the foundation and the wider nonprofit world that the duo kept their “couple” image intact in the media until the moment of their divorce announcement. On Jan 1, 2020, French Gates posted on Instagram: “New Year’s Day will always be extra special to me—marking both a fresh year and an opportunity to celebrate being married to @thisisbillgates. Today makes 26, and I’m still marveling at just how full a heart can get. Happy anniversary to the man who keeps me dancing through life.” By then, she had already been consulting with divorce lawyers.2 Even if those with insight into the divorce had been aware of the rough storm of their marriage, its announcement caused consternation at the Gates Foundation, as many of its roughly 1,800 employees suddenly found themselves wondering about the future of their employer and their own livelihoods. There had always been informal rivalry between those who worked closely with Gates and those who worked with French Gates, but now, the “Team Bill” and “Team Melinda” camps acquired, if not the rabidity of sports fans, at least some of their energy. Uncertainty also rippled through the wider nonprofit world, where hundreds of recipients of grants from the Gates Foundation, in dozens of countries, were gripped by fear and uncertainty as some were told that their funding, which was already under scrutiny as the pandemic shifted priorities, would be put on hold until the foundation had sorted out the implications of the breakup. Although the impact lasted only a few months, it made people panic because so many grantees depend on the foundation for a major chunk of their funds.
“The divorce had a disquieting effect on the nonprofit world,” said Michael Thatcher, a former Microsoft employee who runs Charity Navigator, a nonprofit organization that evaluates other nonprofits to help people direct their giving. Charity Navigator had been receiving grants from the Gates Foundation for several years. When the divorce was announced, the foundation’s grant officers reached out to say that they wouldn’t be able to approve Charity Navigator’s grant renewal proposal for a while. The divorce had temporarily upended the foundation’s planning and approval processes, but during this period of upheaval, the foundation provided Charity Navigator with a bridging grant, and came through with additional funds in 2022. “We were not left high and dry,” Thatcher said. “They took care of their regular recipients but weren’t able to do so for a while.” By the time French Gates left the foundation in 2024, three years after the divorce, it was fully set up for its next chapter.
When Gates and French Gates started their foundation in 2000, Gates was already one of the world’s most recognized businessmen. She, by comparison, was an enigma. The press treated French Gates as sort of a curiosity, partly because she guarded her private life fiercely, requesting that those in her circle not talk about her.3 She made public appearances occasionally, but rarely gave interviews. When she gave speeches—usually on causes dear to her heart, such as the importance of educating girls—she picked low-profile settings like local clubs and community colleges. She was involved in a few local outside efforts and took her first director position in 1999 when she was named to the board of Drugstore.com, one of the early online pharmacies. She served on the board of the Washington Post Company from 2004 to 2010. She also served for a time on the board of trustees at Duke University, her alma mater. When Gates stepped down as the chief executive of Microsoft in 2000 and trained his eyes more closely on his philanthropy, French Gates got involved too, although early foundation employees weren’t made aware of what her contribution would be. However, she had always envisioned a bigger role for herself at the foundation, and as the couple’s three children grew older, she started showing up more and began to embrace publicity. Still, French Gates largely remained a presence by her husband’s side, both inside the foundation and in public. The two portrayed themselves as equal partners, but it was clear that Gates drove the foundation’s direction and priorities, and that he was its chief spokesman.
In 2004, French Gates appeared on Good Morning America, one of her first solo media appearances. (It was her first live television interview, according to a transcript with Diane Sawyer.) Her motto, according to Sawyer, was to “laugh often and to love much in life.”
Two years later, in the swirl of television interviews and press conferences that followed Buffett’s decision to bequeath the bulk of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, French Gates spoke with passion about the uplift of communities that philanthropic dollars could deliver. She spoke of the need to empower women and use their agency to aid development, rather than labeling them as a category that things had to be “done to.” It was one of her first public events on behalf of the foundation, and her early efforts to build a more visible media profile. Part of the reason, she said, was to be a role model for her two daughters.4
In the years immediately following the Buffett gift, as media interest in the foundation revved up, its communications team built a strategy around the former couple. As the two faces of the entity, they were thrust into the spotlight regularly, both together and separately. The idea was to put Gates and French Gates in front of different audiences, according to people involved in developing the strategies. Gates, who was a familiar figure in the traditional business and technology press, was now being positioned as a “thought leader.” The aim was to put him alongside policymakers, world leaders, and corporate decision makers. To do that, the foundation’s communications team pushed him to appear at TED conferences, the World Economic Forum in Davos, fireside chats, and television interviews on specific topics, as well as to pen opinion articles and an annual letter. In 2008, he became the first nongovernment leader to speak at Davos.
At the same time, foundation staffers developed a two-pronged strategy around French Gates. First, they would introduce her to a general mainstream and business audience. In 2008, Fortune magazine wrote one of the first big profiles of French Gates, putting her on the cover. The second part of the strategy was to push French Gates as the foundation cochair who spoke about the challenges and successes of delivery mechanisms in public health or education, two early areas of focus. Gates was—and would always be—the data guy. But she could be what the communications team called the “other side of the mat,” putting a vivid and human spin on the foundation’s work through stories of the difficulties that people in poor countries had in accessing basic healthcare services. It was a struggle to emerge from under Gates’s shadow because her profile was closely intertwined with her husband’s profile, and his focus on global public health. Unlike Gates, who by then was used to extreme media scrutiny, she was a newbie. But people who worked with French Gates to build her public persona found her determined and receptive to their suggestions. She was ambitious and “very interested in being seen as Bill’s equal,” said one person who worked closely on building her image. She welcomed media training and run-throughs of speeches and interviews. She requested intensive briefing documents and asked a lot of questions about the material.
French Gates sought to build an identity that was separate from that of her ex-husband, both internally and externally. She gradually felt her way around the chaotic belly of the foundation, scouting out a role for herself and potential perches she could call her own. At the very beginning, French Gates didn’t want to focus on gender because it would have been the obvious choice for a female philanthropist. But with Gates so focused on public health, as she went on trips and saw more of the world, French Gates realized that gender issues were an opportunity. She didn’t have to follow her husband’s interests, but could instead build her own point of view, according to one former employee of the Gates Foundation who worked directly with French Gates. She messaged her vision differently; as opposed to advocating for women to have equal rights, she made the point that if women have rights, everybody is better off, this person said. “It shows a certain savviness.”
Around 2010, French Gates started pushing for the foundation to create strategies to address women’s rights and empowerment. She not only sought to build gender issues as an area of focus but also tried to include a gender dimension across the foundation’s work, according to employees and news reports.5 Gates considered women’s issues to be part of public health, according to people who worked at the foundation. French Gates argued that global development was its own category and should not be subsumed by global health. Still, women’s rights remained more of an inclusionary aspect of broader program goals at the foundation. One study found that between 2013 and 2015, Gates Foundation dollars accounted for nearly half of the $3.7 billion that went to gender-related issues in developing countries, representing the largest single donor. But the Gates Foundation was not among the top 10 organizations that made such giving a priority.6
Eventually, French Gates became the public face for the foundation’s work on family planning and gender equality. Those who worked with her on some of these issues identified the London Summit on Family Planning in 2012, where she called for voluntary access to family planning for women in the developing world by 2020, as a defining professional moment. In a 2016 announcement posted on the foundation’s website about a new gender-related initiative, only French Gates is listed: “Melinda Gates commits $80 million over three years to collect data about how women live and work around the world,” according to the press release. “The data will help jumpstart the foundation’s work to help women and girls thrive.”
The foundation has directed more money to areas French Gates directly nurtured. In 2020, it created a new gender equality division, focusing on women’s empowerment and bringing a gender lens to all of its work. In 2021, it gave $90 million through that strategy, but in 2022, the amount of money the foundation disbursed to gender equality was far bigger at $747 million—partly because it moved some of its programs, including maternal and newborn health, into the division.
French Gates had to work equally hard to establish herself within the foundation. Given that employees were used to reporting only to Gates, she had to assert herself repeatedly before they began to account for her presence and preferences. Carving out a role for herself inside the foundation meant that Gates had to adjust as well. He was used to striding into a conference room and having meetings geared to what he needed. “He would walk into a meeting and to whoever is leading the meeting he says, let’s go, it’s right to 100mph,” said a former foundation employee. “With Gates, there is no preamble, not much small talk, he tends to launch right in, and he likes efficiency.” With French Gates in the room, “the meeting pace and style had to be adjusted to accommodate her questions as well. Both ask questions, but Gates can rattle off questions as you’re speaking, while French Gates typically waits till the end, rather than cutting someone off.”
Sometimes, he would cut her off too, and she would sit quietly, fuming. At other times, when he launched into a topic and threatened to go on for hours, French Gates would reel him in, saying “Bill, I think they get it.” Gates found it difficult to take her advice in the moment, a tension that created awkward situations for the other attendees. One of those attendees, in describing a particularly contentious meeting, created a tableau: Gates speaking so animatedly that spit flew out of his mouth; his father, then a cochair of the foundation, asleep in his chair; and French Gates, staring into the distance, lips pursed and arms folded.
French Gates’s book describes her ex-husband’s reaction when she asked to cowrite the foundation’s annual letter. Gates had become used to writing it on his own and quite enjoyed the process. When she suggested in 2012 that they write the next one together, his immediate reaction was: The process has been working so well, why change it? She held her ground. For the first two years after that, she wrote a section of the letter, and from 2015 on, they cowrote it until their divorce. Slowly, French Gates established her footing, partly because she insisted to her ex-husband in private conversations that she wanted—and deserved—to be treated as a principal. As Gates made room for her and she became a significant presence in the office, employees too began to adapt. The duo requested that they get the same briefing materials so that one didn’t have an information advantage over the other, but they read them separately and sent back questions, making sure to copy each other on all communications. Gates would typically ask about the technical aspects of a program and the data to back it up, whereas French Gates would ask about the “interface” piece of it—or how easy or difficult it was for the end user. That contrast in approach was helpful to foundation employees because it allowed them to explain things in two ways.
French Gates also asserted herself at Cascade Asset Management, a private investment firm that managed the Gates fortune and the endowment of the foundation. At Cascade’s annual meetings, in which employees shared the performance of the various portfolios, Gates tended to ask all the questions. French Gates was in attendance but far more reserved, according to attendees. But as she became more involved with the foundation’s affairs, she also engaged more with Cascade, and the investment team began preparing a separate, more abridged set of reports for her so that she could educate herself on their holdings. She didn’t ask too many questions, but “behind the scenes she was trying to understand, and over the years you could see progression, where she began to find her voice,” one meeting attendee said.
Despite her insistence and hard work, sharing the platform with a celebrity husband could be tough. As French Gates wrote in her book, “I’ve been trying to find my voice as I’ve been speaking next to Bill… and that can make it hard to be heard.” In the stories of women that she shares in her book, French Gates often seems to find echoes of the power imbalance in her own life. She had to fight for equality within the relationship; it wasn’t going to be handed to her by her former husband. In her book, she also tried to connect with her audience by sharing her own story of being in an abusive relationship (before Bill), which she said killed her self-esteem and which she had never mentioned publicly until the book. “That, to me, is not that different than women in the developing world who lose their voice or have no decision-making power,” she said in an interview about the book.7 Its title comes from the idea of “lift,” the moment when a rocket takes off. Her father was an aerospace engineer in the Apollo missions, and as children, French Gates and her siblings would go watch the rockets launch.
In 2015, French Gates founded Pivotal Ventures, a Seattle-based firm that seeks to empower women through investing, philanthropy, and advocacy. That effort initially came about as a “complementary philanthropic vehicle” to help her go further, faster, according to an interview that Haven Ley, a former Gates Foundation employee who became a key team member of Pivotal, gave to Barron’s.8 But in the following years, Pivotal became French Gates’s launch vehicle as she claimed for herself a public role as a champion of women’s rights. She pulled together a mostly female team, including several staffers like Ley from her personal office at the foundation. Communications professionals were tasked with shaping, sustaining, and burnishing her brand as separate and distinct not only from her husband’s, but also from the foundation’s. Gates never changed out of his uniform of collared shirts, sweaters, and slacks—he once offered fashion advice to Paul Allen’s girlfriend, “basically, to buy all your clothes in the same style and colors and save time by not having to match them,” Allen wrote in his memoir—but French Gates’s wardrobe evolved over the decades. In the 1990s, she typically bought her own outfits at homegrown Seattle stores like Nordstrom, according to a buyer for the luxury department store, and often favored classic brands like Gucci and Prada. Her outfits are still understated, but in recent years, they have become a little edgier—although with none of the verve of, say, Michelle Obama. From her hair to her outfits, from her speeches to her public appearances, French Gates employed a slow but intentional rollout of her “new” self and new firm, but it wouldn’t be until 2018, in the runup to the publication of her book, that Pivotal unveiled fully in the public eye.
In 2019, she penned an opinion piece in Time magazine about women and girls, committing $1 billion to promote gender equity.9 In 2020, she penned another opinion piece for The New York Times to mark International Women’s Day that was a riff on her core message about empowering women, urging readers to start a conversation about gender equality.10 In the months leading up to the announcement of their divorce in May 2021, she was virtually impossible to miss, going on television, giving interviews to magazines and newspapers, and creating the conditions for her emergence as an independent feminist-philanthropist. By 2024, when she decided to leave the Gates Foundation to pursue her own form of philanthropy, that identity had fully taken hold. It was French Gates’s moment of lift.
Bill Gates married Melinda French in 1994 on New Year’s Day on the seventeenth tee of a golf course in Lanai. Roughly 130 guests, including colleagues from Microsoft, close friends, and family, flew to the Hawaiian island. Once the site of pineapple plantations for the Dole Corporation, Lanai has only three hotels. Dirt roads crisscross the land and there are no stoplights. On that Saturday evening, the bride wore her hair down; the groom wore a white tuxedo, a gentle breeze ruffling his sandy blond mop. As the sun set over the bluffs, they set course on their 27-year marriage. The singer Willie Nelson entertained the guests. No reporters or photographers were allowed, but some came anyway for the wedding of the world’s richest man, hoping to shoot a few pictures, catch a couple of quotes. As some of the guests began complaining about the intrusion, Katharine Graham, a friend of the Gates family and publisher of The Washington Post, who was in attendance, proclaimed, “freedom of the press!”
Gates had a security force chase them away, slapping them with no-trespass orders. Later, the overzealous security would cause trouble as reporters claimed harassment at being pushed away from public areas of the island, and even sued the billionaire. Ten days later, on January 10, the newlyweds held a reception in Seattle. The press release from Microsoft described the reception as “classic and elegant.” It was held at a private home and included a formal sit-down dinner. Natalie Cole performed for the guests. French Gates’s fur-trimmed dress caught the attention of antifur activists, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported.
Born Melinda Ann French on August 15, 1964, French Gates grew up in a close-knit family. The second of four children, she was valedictorian at Ursuline Academy of Dallas, an all-girls, Catholic prep school from which she graduated in 1982. She joined Microsoft in 1987 after graduating from Duke University with a degree in computer science and an MBA. Not long after, she made her boss’s acquaintance when she sat next to Gates at a dinner. A few months later, they ran into each other again at the company parking lot. It was a Saturday afternoon and, as French Gates has recounted many times, he asked her out on a date two Fridays out. She responded that it wasn’t “spontaneous” enough for her. Later that day, he called to ask if they could meet for a drink that evening: “Is this spontaneous enough for you?” The couple kept it quiet in the early years of their courtship. Family and close friends knew, but French Gates was particularly mindful of the optics of a junior executive dating the cofounder and chief executive of the company. She rose through the ranks at Microsoft, working as a product manager overseeing teams developing applications like Word and eventually becoming a general manager, but she initially found it difficult to fit into the company’s culture. “It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point they were making and every piece of data they were debating,” French Gates wrote in The Moment of Lift. “It was as if every meeting, no matter how casual, was a dress rehearsal for the strategy review with Bill.”11 Women were mainly in the product management and marketing side of the company, and female engineers were hard to spot. After dating on and off for about five years, Gates and French Gates got engaged in the spring of 1993, when she was 28 and he was 37. The news of the engagement made the front page of The Wall Street Journal under the headline: A MARRIAGE MADE AT MICROSOFT: WILL BILLIONAIRE’S UNION LEAD TO A COMPUTER DYNASTY, OR LESSEN HIS AMBITION?
People who worked with Gates at the time said that it was well understood that the Microsoft cofounder, consumed as he was by his company, had not factored marriage or children into his life. There were those in the computer industry who wondered what kind of husband and father he would make. For a time, he dated Ann Winblad, one of the technology world’s early female entrepreneurs. A few years older than Gates, Winblad wanted to settle down and start a family. Hoping to plant the marriage seed in Gates’s mind and introduce him to the joys of family life, she invited Mitch Kapor, the Lotus founder, his then wife, and their toddler for a visit to her cottage in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Gates spent the entire weekend immersed in a biography of Henry Ford, although he did take a break or two—to ride a dune buggy.
Gates’s mother, Mary Gates, was also pushing her only son to consider marriage. He asked friends and key confidantes about their views; coworkers, tired of his monomaniacal focus on work, joked that married life would slow him down. In the documentary Inside Bill’s Brain, which aired in September 2019, French Gates recounted how she entered his bedroom once to find Gates writing a list of the pros and cons of marriage on his whiteboard. She also said in the film that their relationship had come to a point where they would either get married or break up. Gates decided to get married because, as he told Playboy magazine in 1994, French Gates made him feel like it, despite all his “past rational thinking on the topic.”12 He added that he liked women who were smart and independent. One former Microsoft executive who spoke directly with Gates at the time said that French Gates represented the kind of responsible, caring, and warm person that “mapped onto his mother”—someone with whom he could settle down and have children.
In the early 1990s, Gates had begun building a multistoried 66,000-square-foot mansion on a five-acre parcel of land in Medina, a suburb of Seattle on the rim of Lake Washington. With a population of 3,000, Medina is where some of the country’s wealthiest have built a dense cluster of mansions nestled amid thickets of firs, maples, and alders, and 10-foot-tall hedges. Nearly every lakefront house has a yacht. It’s not uncommon to see a Porsche 911 GT3 stop by the corner deli. Gates had originally conceived of the house as a man cave outfitted with the kind of hi-tech, futuristic accoutrements one would expect from a technology billionaire, but also as a showcase for his growing collection of valuable art and literature. In 1994, Gates paid $30.8 million for his prized Leonardo da Vinci manuscript, and pursuing his love of photography, he had also bought the Bettmann Archive, a gallery of historical photos. Built in the style of a Pacific lodge, with sloping roofs and rich, tan wood from hundreds of Douglas firs, the house earned the nickname Xanadu 2.0, after the over-the-top mansion built by Charles Foster Kane in the movie Citizen Kane. It included a movie theater and a trampoline room, a nod to Gates’s old habit of jumping out of trash cans and over armchairs.13 French Gates, horrified at the thought of moving into and raising children in a showy but soulless structure, hired Thierry Despont, the famed French architect and interior designer, to dab on some homey touches and create warm, intimate areas that could embrace the clutter of daily life.14 Xanadu 2.0 took more than six years to build, and once the riot of construction ended, and the interior decorators had left, the couple moved in along with their baby daughter. In 2007, a Microsoft intern named Robert Smith had the chance to visit the house. “Going down Bill’s driveway is like arriving at Jurassic Park,” Smith wrote in a blog post.15 He raved about the green carpet of land surrounding the house—“there’s grass that looks like someone went at it with scissors”—and the movie theater, complete with “Now Showing” posters. French Gates occasionally took visitors on a tour of the house, pointing out the Douglas firs on the property and the swimming pool that was separated into outdoor and indoor sections by an underwater divider. A highlight was the estuary built on the compound, fed by a stream, where salmon, trout, and other fish came to spawn. Indoors, the walls of one study were plastered with award plaques and notes from world leaders the duo had received for their philanthropic work. Priceless objets d’art and museum artifacts were carefully placed around the house. Once, Despont commissioned an artist to create replicas of a 2,000-year-old gold-leaf vase Gates had seen in a museum in Italy that he supposedly wanted to buy—but that the museum would not sell to him. About a dozen replicas of the vase, which age had stained with a unique patina, were placed around the house as table-lamp bases. The couple loved F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby so much that they even had their favorite quote from the book painted on the ceiling of their library: “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.”16 When they were dating, French Gates would leave a green light on in her office at Microsoft, which signaled to Gates that he could visit—an echo, perhaps, of the “green light” that Nick Carraway describes as he writes about Gatsby’s love for Daisy Buchanan. Gates, who once got a speeding ticket as a young man in Albuquerque, indulged his passion for fast cars, building a collection of Porsches, Mercedeses, and other luxury cars. An underground garage with room for around 20 cars was tunneled into the property. Armed security guards kept a close eye on curious visitors, shooing away tourists sightseeing by boat on the lake when they came too close to the property.
Eventually, Gates eased into married life. Their three children—the eldest, Jennifer, born in 1996; the middle child, Rory, born in 1999; and the youngest, Phoebe, born in 2002—grew up in the Medina home. At school, French Gates registered the children under her maiden name to maintain privacy. Seattle residents would sometimes see French Gates, a practicing Catholic, during Sunday mass, kids in tow. As children who grew up in inconceivable luxury, whose lives could only be truly understood by the billionaire class, they indulged their passions, and continue to do so. Jennifer is a pediatrician, having graduated from the Icahn School of Medicine at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, and a show jumper who owns breeding stables and horse farms, including in upstate New York. Married to a fellow equestrian, Nayel Nassar, a Stanford-educated Egyptian American, she operates in a rarefied circle of equestrians, including the children of celebrities and other billionaires, among them Eve Jobs, the daughter of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell Jobs; Georgina Bloomberg, the daughter of Michael Bloomberg; and Olympian Jessica Springsteen, the daughter of Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa. In 2023, Gates and French Gates became grandparents after Jennifer gave birth to a baby girl. Rory, a graduate of the University of Chicago, retains a much lower profile than his siblings. The youngest, Phoebe, a Stanford University student and budding fashionista, wields considerable clout on social media where she posts a stream of content including videos of her dad being goofy and her mom’s work in women’s rights.
The view among many observers of the Gates marriage and its unraveling is that each held different notions about the meaning of a marital contract. Even though French Gates agreed to marry Gates, fully aware of his reservations about the institution of marriage, the two were very much in love, and her sympathizers said she genuinely believed that the fact of being married would make a difference because of her own deeply held belief in its sanctity. Those who are more accommodating of Gates observed that love and marriage can often mean two different things. One former associate of the Microsoft cofounder pointed out the difference between marrying someone and committing to exclusivity in that marriage, comparing it with the arrangement Buffett had with his first wife, Susan Buffett, who left him to travel and pursue a singing career but arranged for a companion for her husband. (They remained married, and “more than amicable,” Buffett said, until Susan’s death in 2004.) It was hardly a sparkless or joyless marriage, according to those who observed the former couple in private settings. There were plenty of moments of mirth and affection between the two. There were times when she reached for his hand. Yet, he was unfaithful to her over the years. “There’s a duality in Bill,” said one person who worked closely with French Gates. “He loves Melinda very much and [I] don’t think he ever thought he would lose her.” At the same time, “Melinda is wired to serious monogamous relationships.”
Gates’s years as a young man who liked to party and go to strip joints were widely known among Microsoft executives, as well as others in the still-small tech community of the 1980s. In Hard Drive, a 1993 biography of Gates by two investigative reporters for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the authors recount how the young Microsoft cofounder once flew by helicopter to a chalet in the French Alps for an international sales meeting, where they partied all night. At 5 A.M., as one of the attendees was leaving, he almost stepped on Gates, lying on top of a woman. Before his marriage, Gates was often “besieged” by women who wanted to date him, and he sometimes reciprocated their advances, the reporters wrote.17
The July 21, 1986, issue of Fortune magazine carried a cover story about how Microsoft pulled off its initial public offering that year. In the story, filled with details about the company’s high-stakes negotiations with bankers and lawyers, the journalist David Kirkpatrick noted, in almost a throwaway way: “Gates, a gawky, washed-out blond, confesses to being a ‘wonk,’ a bookish nerd, who focuses single-mindedly on the computer business though he masters all sorts of knowledge with astounding facility. Oddly, Gates is something of a ladies’ man and a fiendishly fast driver who has racked up speeding tickets even in the sluggish Mercedes diesel he bought to restrain himself.”18
A person familiar with Gates’s interactions with women said that until the Microsoft cofounder got married, there were women who hoped to catch their boss’s eye, and Gates enjoyed the attention. Some women even wore MARRY ME, BILL T-shirts to office events.19 A former senior Microsoft employee recalled being told by an office assistant to Gates that he was like “a kid in a candy store” in the company of women, if not restrained. In the early 1990s, when Microsoft was one the biggest clients of Goldman Sachs, which had taken the company public, Gates would sometimes hit on women at cocktail receptions arranged by the bank—including the spouses of senior bankers, recalled one person with knowledge of discussions Goldman executives had on the matter. It’s unlikely that the bank took any action, given that Microsoft was its biggest tech client. Once, a female acquaintance of Gates who was planning to stay at his guest apartment called his office to ask for his home phone number, in case she had problems getting there. Gates’s secretary hesitated. When the female acquaintance pushed the secretary for his number, she reluctantly told her that Gates’s mother, Mary, did not let her hand out her bachelor son’s number to girls.
Rumors about Gates and his gallivanting have long circulated inside Microsoft, the Gates Foundation, and Cascade, the investment firm that manages his fortune, according to people who have worked at each of the entities. Well into his marriage, it was not unusual for Gates to flirt with women and pursue them, making unwanted advances, such as asking a Microsoft employee out to dinner while he was still the company’s chairman.20 In 2000, Gates conducted an affair with a Microsoft employee. Nearly two decades later, in 2019, the woman informed the company’s board about the relationship, which led to an investigation by a committee of the board that was aided by an outside law firm. The investigation led to Gates stepping down from the Microsoft board in 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported.21 At the time, a representative for Gates acknowledged that the affair had happened but said that it had ended “amicably,” and that the board’s investigation had nothing to do with Gates stepping down. On occasion, Gates flirted with some of the interns at the Gates Foundation, putting them in the uncomfortable position of having to think about their career prospects while not wanting to be hit on by the boss, according to one person who was aware of his behavior. In one instance, a colleague chastised the person for sending a 22-year-old intern to Gates’s office by herself: “She’s too young and too pretty,” the person recalled the colleague saying. More recent reports suggest that in 2010, Gates, an avid bridge player, also conducted an affair with a Russian bridge player, Mila Antonova, who was then in her twenties.22 Gates’s approaches were clumsy rather than predatory, according to people who knew about some of them, witnessed them firsthand, or reviewed flirtatious emails he sent to them; one labeled them “cringeworthy.” At least three people who knew Gates at different points in his life, from the Microsoft days to the foundation, said that he did not prey upon female employees and seek sex with them in exchange for promoting their careers. “Bill was far from predatory,” said a former Microsoft executive with direct insight into his boss’s behavior. “That was never his problem.” Gates was “not Harvey Weinstein,” this person said, referring to the former movie producer and convicted sex offender who is serving a prison sentence. He could be “charming, respectful and just fun, so you start there…. I know of no real situation in which anyone got anything for sleeping with Bill.” Gates displayed a certain naïveté in his interactions with women, occasionally mistaking an engaged conversation for mutual interest and pursuing it gently but dropping it if the other person didn’t reciprocate, according to sympathizers. He enjoyed the adoration that came his way as a celebrity, especially at conferences and events where both women and men would form a throng around him, but couldn’t always tell the difference between flattery and flirtation.
French Gates wasn’t always happy with the script. The Microsoft billionaire’s calendar would include blocks of time for what were ostensibly personal meetings into which few people had visibility, according to two people who directly knew about the events. More than a decade ago, Gates’s longtime executive assistant was replaced, two people who knew about the action said; one of them said the change happened because the assistant was “enabling him to be places where [Melinda] didn’t know he was at.” There were other abrupt personnel changes over the years, including within Gates’s personal security team, according to two people who knew about the changes and a third who was told about them. Reid, the Gates Ventures spokeswoman, said the security team was replaced for “compliance reasons,” but declined to elaborate.
Gates occasionally sought freedom from his highly choreographed days, which were packed with back-to-back meetings, often in five- to ten-minute increments. He relished his time with Buffett, especially visits to Omaha where the two billionaires enjoyed meandering, freewheeling conversations that were in sharp contrast to the structured life he led with French Gates. Buffett once observed to a friend that Gates’s visits seemed to him to be moments of respite from a tightly scheduled life, including personal time, largely organized and arranged by French Gates, which included family time. When Buffett asked Gates why he couldn’t control his life and live it in a way he wanted to, Gates would simply shrug. “Bill likes to have a schedule; I don’t,” Buffett said in an email. Buffett, who is famously conflict-averse, stepped away from the troubling situation at the foundation after the divorce; that way, he wouldn’t have to deal with any potential ugliness. Some saw it as a signal to the world that his legendary friendship with Gates had cooled over the years.
French Gates has said publicly that she wanted the marriage to work. The two even went to marital counseling after an especially rough patch in the early- to mid-2000s around the time their youngest child, Phoebe, was born, according to a person who knew about the events. But Gates assumed that his behavior would have no consequences. In the spate of publicity following the announcement of their divorce and reports of Gates’s extramarital affairs, French Gates shared some of the ugly aspects of her marriage. In media appearances, she was sometimes harsh toward her ex-husband while also displaying her own vulnerability. She told the CBS anchor Gayle King that it wasn’t one thing, but rather many things that had led to the divorce. There came a point when there was “enough there” that it wasn’t healthy. In the interview, she all but stated that there was a pattern of conduct from Gates that she tolerated for a long time until she decided she couldn’t anymore. “I couldn’t trust what we had anymore,” she said, adding that there were nights when she found herself lying on the carpet, in tears, wondering how to move forward. “I was committed to this marriage. I gave everything to this marriage. So I don’t question myself now.” Asked by King about a report that said Gates had multiple affairs, she responded: “Those are questions Bill needs to answer.” When journalists asked her why Gates continued to meet with Epstein, French Gates responded: “Those are questions for Bill to answer.”
On several occasions, French Gates has said that her ex-husband’s relationship with Epstein contributed to their divorce. She had met Epstein once, in 2013, around the time when Gates’s staff had been running their campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize for the foundation’s work on polio eradication. On September 20, a Friday, French Gates and Gates were in New York to receive the Lasker-Bloomberg award for public service, awarded to them for “advancing global health through enlightened philanthropy.” That evening at 7:30 P.M., as the day’s pleasant warmth gave way to the gentle chill of early fall, they arrived for dinner at Epstein’s residence—a seven-story mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, just off Central Park, that was built in the French neoclassical style with a limestone facade popular in that part of town. From the moment she walked in the door, French Gates was unsettled. The entryway and reception area took up two stories. One wall was lined with framed and signed photographs of famous men, including former president Bill Clinton. Female figurines, some of them suggestively dressed, sat by the marble staircase. A life-size female doll hung from a chandelier.23 On the second floor, there was a mural of a prison scene, with Epstein portrayed in the center. His taste in art tended toward the bizarre. According to a 2003 profile in Vanity Fair, one wall of his mansion displayed rows upon rows of framed eyeballs, which Epstein told the reporter had been made for injured soldiers and imported from England.24 French Gates sat uncomfortably throughout the dinner, and later told friends she was furious that her then husband would not cut off ties with him. Since the divorce, she has also spoken publicly about her disgust for the convicted sex offender, calling him “abhorrent” and evil personified.
In 2022, she spoke at an event at which she said she had taken the psychotherapist Esther Perel’s masterclass on relational intelligence.25 It taught her, she said, to think about power and collaboration within a relationship, and that the power dynamic isn’t necessarily a given but something that is negotiated by two people who make space for each other, even if one person is the breadwinner. French Gates said it was a reminder to her about how to approach future romantic relationships she might have. “She’s been exceptionally transparent about her marriage,” said an acquaintance of French Gates with knowledge of her thinking. “Melinda does nothing that isn’t intentional. It had been coming for a long time.”
Not long after French Gates’s interview with Gayle King, Gates did one of his own with Savannah Guthrie on NBC. He didn’t admit clearly whether he had had an affair, but stuck firmly to his talking points, admitting that he had “made a mistake,” but that it was not constructive to go into the details. When Guthrie asked Gates what he had learned about himself through the experience of his divorce, and what advice he might have for others in his situation, he said he was more knowledgeable about scientific research than personal relationships. “There’s areas like climate or health where I have expertise, on personal matters like this, I don’t think of myself as an expert. I should be very humble about success, you know, has a tricky aspect to it, so you know… I don’t have great advice for other people.” Elsewhere, Gates has insisted that it was a great marriage from his point of view, and that he wouldn’t have chosen to marry anyone else.
French Gates, with an estimated net worth of $11 billion, wants to make money off American society’s sidelined goals. At Pivotal Ventures, the investment and advocacy firm she founded in 2015, social good is not the only return she seeks for her dollars. Rather, the firm sees an opportunity to bet on start-ups working on issues that are almost entirely overlooked by the traditional venture capital business. Among the companies in Pivotal’s portfolio are Tia, which offers birth control and sexual health advice; Penny Finance, which is building tools to offer women financial education; and Candoo, which essentially offers tech support for older adults, helping them learn how to use new software and devices such as iPhones and Amazon’s Alexa.
These are small investments of no more than a few million dollars. Made mostly within the past few years, they are tentative steps by Pivotal to see if it can make venture capital–style returns while sticking with its broader mission to pursue gender equality and women’s empowerment in the United States. The firm has also invested in some higher-profile private companies, including Ellevest, the personal finance site geared toward women that was founded by former Wall Street banker Sallie Krawcheck; and All Raise, which is dedicated to women in tech. A consultant who studied Pivotal’s investment strategy said the firm, despite having virtually no track record, expects to have greater credibility and better investment opportunities come its way by promoting French Gates’s name and close involvement to company founders. “Melinda’s name being attached to it carries a cachet,” the consultant said.26
Nestled in a Seattle suburb, Pivotal operates out of an airy office suffused with light, plush in the way modern workplaces are, with a lot of “collaborative” spaces, wood and fabric touches, and a swanky kitchen. The firm is structured as a limited liability company rather than a traditional charitable foundation. Where the latter are bound by laws on how much they need to give away annually to maintain their tax-free status, and cannot fund political campaigns or lobby, limited liability companies pay taxes, but have the flexibility to embrace multiple strategies to promote a founder’s goals, whether through venture investing, political contributions, advocacy, or charitable giving. Pivotal can thus invest in companies, make grants, or support advocacy, or do all three, in pursuit of its goal to increase women’s political power, and as of 2024 it had invested in 150 such groups. It even has a publishing arm called Moment of Lift books, an imprint of Macmillan’s Flatiron Books, which was launched in 2021 to publish nonfiction that promotes equality for girls. Through the LLC structure, which has become increasingly popular with philanthropists, Pivotal has sought to be more experimental and innovative, while bringing the same analysis and rigor to projects as the Gates Foundation does, according to an outside consultant who has worked with the firm. Pivotal’s main goals are getting more women into technology jobs and elected to public office, supporting women and girls of color, and advocating for paid family and medical leave and caregiving. (In 2021, Pivotal called upon the Biden White House to appoint a “caregiving czar,” an effort to transform childcare.) French Gates wants Pivotal to work with a wide range of players, including activists, advocates, investors, and innovators, hoping to use her substantial influence to bring focus to these issues.
For years, Pivotal was little more than a landing page as people who worked for French Gates conducted research to try to figure out what the entity should be. At the foundation, much of her work had been tied to gender equality and women’s empowerment, but within the realm of global development. She had long sought to involve the foundation in domestic issues like getting more women into the fields of technology and computer science and increasing their representation on boards and in public life, but those ideas didn’t get much airtime, partly because of the foundation’s narrow focus on education within the United States. That was at least partly the impetus for starting Pivotal. The core insight that drove her gender-focused work at the foundation also underpins her work at Pivotal: that funding women’s causes helps general development, and the world is better off if all girls are educated. In a video on the website of Pivotal, she explains the need to accelerate the pace of change for women. “My hopes and dreams for my daughters are exactly the same as [for] my son, which is I hope that they can do whatever they choose to do with their talents out in the world. And definitely, it’s sad to think about, hey, will my daughters run into barriers that my son won’t, just because of their gender?” By 2018, a year before her memoir The Moment of Lift was published, Pivotal became much more active. The following year, French Gates said she would commit $1 billion to her firm over a 10-year period to focus on gender equality.
As a philanthropist, French Gates has long advocated for contraception and the reproductive rights of women, especially those from poor backgrounds, arguing that women should be able to choose whether and when to have children, and that unplanned and unwanted pregnancies not only are devastating to women, but also hurt economic productivity. She came to that conclusion after seeing firsthand the struggles of poor women who’d had their agency taken away from them in African and Indian villages. That position put her directly at odds with her Catholic faith, impelling her to approach her advocacy for family planning through the lens of the Church’s teachings on helping the poor, but also inviting its criticism. She addresses the conflict in her book by quoting from the Gospel of Luke: “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”27
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, French Gates came out strongly in favor of abortion rights, seeing the reversal through the lens of female agency and autonomy—when “decisions are made for women as opposed to by them.”28 In the fall of 2022, Pivotal, the Obama Foundation, and the Clooney Foundation for Justice announced a partnership to build women’s empowerment—to support “female change makers and their empowerment.” As part of that effort, French Gates, Michelle Obama, and Amal Clooney, the international human rights lawyer and wife of Hollywood actor George Clooney, have spoken on panels and at public events. In November 2023, the trio visited Malawi and South Africa as part of a campaign to end child marriage.
French Gates and her handlers at Pivotal have focused on the same high-visibility media strategy that the Gates Foundation employed. As with many public figures, including her former husband, the shaping of her image is a combination of taking her elemental qualities and transforming them into a consistent message. For years, she had been crafting a public persona distinct from her husband’s at the foundation. One example was the foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, an assessment of how world leaders are doing against the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2015. In 2021, Gates and French Gates each said their piece in slickly produced videos, but they couldn’t have been more different in attitude and content. Each is reflective of the personality of its creator—exactly what the world has come to expect. In a one-minute video, French Gates focused purely on the power of women and how they hold up the world, and how women of all races and backgrounds did so during the pandemic. Gates’s video was five minutes of statistics, maps, and factoids about global health and the pandemic response. In Pivotal, she has created a firm very much in her own image, setting a tone that combines ambition with humility, and expressing empowerment by embracing vulnerability. She speaks the language of empathy, compassion, and human connection, calling for “empathic leadership” and a “values-based” approach to work and life. “Heartbreaking” is a word she uses often to describe the things she has seen in her travels. Despite her high visibility and frequent public appearances, French Gates told a BBC interviewer in February 2024 that she finds it all unappealing. “I don’t think it will ever sit particularly well,” she said, when asked about why she gives interviews. “I’ve gotten more comfortable saying my truth, and much more comfortable in voicing what I know and have seen in places all over the world, but you know, I’m not particularly excited about the idea of being a public figure.”
Her fraying ties to the foundation and to Gates, and her emergence as an independent philanthropist, had been visible in other ways. In 2010, when the former couple, along with Warren Buffett, had announced the Giving Pledge campaign, she and Gates had written a letter jointly, pledging to give most of their shared fortune to the Gates Foundation. But after their divorce was finalized in the summer of 2021, each wrote fresh Giving Pledge letters, renewing their commitment to giving away most of their wealth. In her letter, French Gates emphasized the importance of ground-up rather than top-down philanthropy and the need for flexibility rather than ideology to drive decisions around giving and grant-making, displaying a sensitivity and awareness to criticisms of big philanthropy.
That fortune, estimated at $11 billion, came to her as part of that divorce settlement. Gates had begun transferring assets to her soon after their divorce announcement—mainly billions of dollars’ worth of shares in companies like AutoNation, Deere, and Canadian National, according to regulatory filings reported by Bloomberg. Gates transferred $2.4 billion of Microsoft stock to her in 2022. As of that year, she had more than $1.4 billion worth of stock she had received in different companies. Cascade, the private investment firm that oversees both the Gates fortune and the foundation’s endowment, no longer manages French Gates’s personal money.
When the divorce was announced, the foundation had said that its two cochairs would continue to work together, with the understanding that if they couldn’t get along within or after a two-year trial period, French Gates would leave, and her ex-husband would give her funds to pursue her own philanthropy. The former couple maintained a professional relationship, working together to guide the foundation, a person close to her said, but French Gates found it challenging at times. In 2024, when she cut ties with the foundation completely, Gates gave her $12.5 billion—an amount of money that would give her enormous heft in carrying out her mission. As of May 2024, there were discussions underway about how those billions would be used, and whether it would all be directed through Pivotal. French Gates also planned to update sections of her Giving Pledge letter to reflect the new reality.
Even though French Gates is building Pivotal with a specific focus on women, observers of philanthropy don’t expect her to veer fundamentally away from Gates’s worldview. People who have worked with the couple say that Gates and French Gates are united in how they see the role of philanthropy in the world. She has embraced the same market-based fundamentals that drove decision-making at the Gates Foundation, the people said. It’s just that she wants to do more for gender equality and women’s rights, the way Gates handles his climate and energy investing through Breakthrough Energy, and his technology investing through Gates Ventures.
Comparisons between French Gates and MacKenzie Scott are inevitable. Both women got divorced around the same time and emerged as independent billionaire philanthropists. But that’s perhaps where the comparisons end. At the same time, Scott, who inherited about $38 billion as part of her divorce settlement, has been giving it away silently. She maintains a low public profile and gives no interviews. Her style of giving involves doing the research on a nonprofit and writing a check for the organization to use as it sees fit. In December 2022, Scott launched an organization called Yield Giving. The website has no frills or fanfare. It is heavy on text and low on visuals, evocative of the unfussy and self-effacing way in which Scott has gone about her business of giving money away. Scott typically puts her money into donor-advised funds and relies on advisors around the country to help her figure out how and where to donate the funds. Nonprofits can send proposals to Yield Giving, which has a committee to review them and help with grant-making.
“I would say that they are more similar than different,” said Jeannie Infante Sager, the the former director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and a faculty member of its Fund Raising School. “There is a transparency to their giving that is inspiring,” said Sager. The institute received grants from the Gates Foundation that Sager said were initially spurred by French Gates as she developed her philanthropic strategy. It has continued to work with Pivotal, and Sager has also helped Yield Giving carry out some of its work. She added that both have been thoughtful, rather than slapdash, about their approaches. The high profile of Pivotal has drawn attention to what Sager said has been a growing trend of giving in the past decade by women and for women’s causes. Her research has found that women often approach philanthropy differently than men, preferring to give collectively and holistically. Empathy can drive their giving, as can rage. So-called rage giving to women’s organizations spiked in 2016 after Donald Trump was elected president, Sager found. There was a similar spike after the Supreme Court overthrew the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.
Elizabeth Dale, the Seattle University professor who teaches nonprofit leadership, said that Pivotal’s impact has been hard to assess. “Is Pivotal making a difference on the ground yet? It’s been eight years,” Dale said. The firm hasn’t gotten the kind of attention one would expect given French Gates’s star power, she said, partly because the giving has been relatively minimal. “Outside of the gender space, I don’t think a lot of people have heard about it.”
French Gates remains undeterred. She has harnessed the press and other online platforms to get her message out, from writing opinion articles to teaching a masterclass on “impactful giving,” convinced that a steady drumbeat of publicity is essential to Pivotal’s work. She considers herself a medium through which the experiences and realities of other women can be told, and a powerful voice that tells women they can do anything. It’s the voice she used in 2018, when she penned a missive about the importance of computer science education for girls and women. The essay was titled: “The Next Bill Gates Won’t Look Like the Last One.”