There are some, shall we say, eccentricities we have come to expect of a certain class of tech billionaire. Morning ice baths instead of coffee. Calorie restriction—or slaughtering their own meat—for lunch. Meetings on the beach, or barefoot in a conference room, or perhaps while in a rocket ship to space. Whether it’s ego, or masculine performance, or some sense of competition, chasing the extreme seems to be a way of life for these titans—when they’re not chasing immortality itself. How else do you explain wanting to upload your consciousness to the cloud?
Melinda French Gates—philanthropist; billionaire; and former spouse to an original tech titan, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates—is, in the way we think about billionaires today, something of an anomaly. She is one of the richest women in the world. Yet shortly after the Gateses announced their split, French Gates pledged to donate a majority of her income. “Giving away money your family will never need is not an especially noble act,” she wrote in a public letter. And as for conquering the universe? “That’s just not me,” French Gates tells me, laughing. “That’s not who I am.”
French Gates is speaking to me from her office in Kirkland, Washington, a nondescript concrete structure in an office park along the lake that, while it doesn’t have a cryochamber in its basement or an indoor swimming pool, does have free tampons in the bathroom (and a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique on display in the lobby). We are in an airy, cream-colored conference room with a view of Lake Washington and the Olympic Mountains, which appear in sharp relief on this uncharacteristically sunny Pacific Northwest day, and French Gates—her hair blown out, in light makeup and a brown sweater—is sipping an iced drink. She is here to talk about her philanthropic endeavors funded by Pivotal through which she has committed $2 billion to “expanding women’s power and influence” in the U.S. and globally.
She is also, loosely, here to talk about the things in her personal and professional life that have surrounded that commitment: Her divorce from her husband of 27 years. Her departure last year from the world-changing Gates Foundation, which bore her name for almost 25 years. Turning 60—which, contrary to some of her billionaire peers, she seems to have embraced. And also the new book she will publish in April, a memoir called The Next Day, about life transitions, including those aforementioned. One of the stipulations of this interview was that we wouldn’t delve too deeply into the content of the book (her team doesn’t want any spoilers), but the book is about change and moving forward, and it’s safe to say she’s in the midst of both.
For close to three decades, French Gates was the woman beside a man who would upend the way we thought about computers, and he was the man beside a woman who would change the way we thought about giving. She was also a fiercely private wife and mother, who would retire from an impressive career at Microsoft, where she and Gates met, to raise the couple’s three children. She oversaw their education, managed the Gates’s massive high-tech estate, Xanadu 2.0 (it was named after the mansion in Citizen Kane; Bill had already purchased it before they married), and ran a foundation that would give away more than $77.6 billion to help eradicate polio, eliminate malaria and HIV, and fight poverty and disease around the world.
Those who know French Gates have always known she was a force in her own right. Bill is “smart as hell,” Warren Buffett once said of his longtime friends, “but she is smarter”: a woman who could manage a household; wow the dignitaries who underestimated her; and focus on maintaining a sense of normalcy in her family, even with the kind of wealth that, she says, “no one should have.” Even now, as her ex-husband is on the speaking circuit promoting his own book—the first of three planned memoirs, which came out in February—he has noted that many things had to coalesce in order for him to achieve the kind of grand success he did, and one of the biggest ones was his partnership. “My marriage to Melinda, that kept me grounded,” he told a reporter for a profile in The Times of London. The family still spends some holidays together.
But things had been going south for a while. Gates has publicly acknowledged an extramarital affair involving a Microsoft employee, which led to an internal investigation in 2019. (Gates ultimately stepped down from the board, which his spokesperson had said was unrelated to the matter.) French Gates is said to have been displeased with the way a sexual harassment claim against Gates’s longtime money manager was handled by her husband, according to press reports, and she expressed discomfort with her husband spending time with Epstein after Epstein had pled guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution with a minor, according to a New York Times article published in 2021. French Gates hired divorce lawyers.
In the ’90s, during the Microsoft antitrust trial, Bill Gates was widely viewed as one of the most ruthless bullies in the business, and one of its toughest negotiators. So you can imagine what a divorce arbitration might have looked like. French Gates writes that she had panic attacks just thinking about it, and it took a while to untangle their affairs. When all was said and done, however, her family was supportive—including her youngest daughter, Phoebe, who was still a teenager at the time, and her Catholic parents, who’d been married 63 years.
French Gates was now free to allocate her funds as she pleased, without having to convince a cochair or a board. On a vacation with friends after the divorce, a trip they jokingly dubbed her “freedom tour,” she discussed her plans to narrow her professional focus to women, and largely here in the United States. Only about 2 percent of philanthropic giving goes toward programs aimed at women and girls, French Gates tells me.
The way she thinks about it is simple: Women and girls make up half the world’s population. And yet the systemic disparities they confront—lack of health research, representation in politics, abortion access, workplace rights, technology access—face a persistent lack of funding. There is ample evidence to show that more women are “advancing into” their power, as she puts it, yields all sorts of societal benefits, from better economic returns to more innovative technology. And while there are many organizations out there doing great work to further these goals, for too long they’ve been playing defense. She wants them to have the means to play offense. “We all have power,” she says. “But there are barriers in society that often keep women from using our full power. Our job is to help remove those barriers.”
In 2019, French Gates pledged $1 billion over the course of 10 years toward advancing women’s rights. Then, last year, she committed an additional $1 billion, including $235 million to organizations like the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which works on sexual harassment and discrimination cases; the Center for Reproductive Rights, whose focus includes reproductive health and abortion; and Paid Leave for All, which French Gates is particularly passionate about. She notes that the United States remains the only Western nation without a comprehensive paid family leave policy. French Gates has also allocated some $45 million toward increasing the representation of women in technology, including AI, and has offered grants of $20 million to a variety of individuals—Jacinda Ardern, Ava DuVernay, Richard Reeves—to distribute as they see fit.
Advancing the rights of women—and seeing how they fit into the broader equation of social progress—is a cause that French Gates has long championed, even if indirectly. For years, at the Gates Foundation, she was the voice urging others to see the gender angle in almost any social problem, from vaccination efforts in the developing world (to reach more children, target mothers) to agriculture (women farmers often lack the same training as men). It’s also uniquely personal to her, going back to her upbringing in Catholic schools, and to parents who encouraged her ambition, but also to finding herself the outlier in rooms full of men: first as a computer science major in college, then later at Microsoft. “Men make certain decisions—not necessarily bad decisions, but decisions based on their lens on society, right?” she explains.
French Gates is among a small club of former wives who are giving very differently—and living differently, too, like MacKenzie Scott, with whom she pledged $40 million to gender equality groups a few years ago; and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, who in an email praised French Gates’s ability to “blend deep compassion with sharp analytical thinking.” Her approach, as always, is thoughtful, strategic, purposeful. I ask her if she’s worried about the message all these rich guys in power—with their rivalries and their rockets and their calls for more “masculine energy” at work—send to the masses. “I think it’s really important to not see billionaires as a monolith,” she tells me, choosing her words carefully. “And not all of them need to stand on a stage to talk about or to demonstrate what they’re doing.”
Melinda Ann French was born in Dallas, the second of four kids, to an aerospace engineer father (he worked on the Apollo mission) and homemaker mother who didn’t go to college and regretted it. Education was important to the family, and the motto at her all-girl Catholic high school, “Serviam” (Latin for “I will serve”), was an early influence on the way she’d view her role in the world.
But computers also shaped it. In 1980, when Melinda was around 15, her dad brought home an early Apple computer—and a young Melinda learned the programming language BASIC, writing the code for a square smiley face that moved around the screen to the tune of “It’s a Small World.” She went on to major in computer science—one of 15 women in her class at Duke—before going on to earn an MBA. After working several summers at IBM, she landed a job interview at a little-known Seattle company called Microsoft. She spent nine years there, describing the culture as “brash, so argumentative, and competitive,” but fulfilling. “I loved my career at Microsoft,” she says. “The internet was in its nascent days. We would go into somebody’s office, and the person would tap in, and we’d be like, ‘Whoa, it’s the internet!’ We knew we were changing the world.”
First as a marketing manager, and then the general manager for information products, French Gates oversaw the launch of Word and Expedia, as well as “Bob,” a cartoon-like Windows interface that was meant to make PCs more user-friendly, but was roundly mocked (and discontinued after less than a year). When French Gates left the company in 1996, soon after giving birth to her eldest daughter, she was overseeing 1,800 people.
French Gates had always known she wanted to be a parent. But to have the family life she wanted—and the kind that she and Bill talked about—“that just wasn’t possible with one person being on the road and being CEO” without the other one at home. And so she became the keeper of the household; the rule enforcer but also the moral compass, as her daughter Phoebe puts it (“she’s been my rock, my entire life”); the one to make decisions about meals and chores. Once the kids were in school, she cajoled her husband to do drop off, but insisted he not start until the third week of school. That way, the kids could acclimate before their famous father showed up at the bus line. “We got about two weeks where we were just ‘the Frenches,’” she said. “People saw that we were normal.”
“We had real discussions about how our family was different, but you shouldn’t think any more of yourself because of that.”
Her family’s privacy was intensely important to her, as was maintaining some regularity in the way they lived. She decided that the kids would use her maiden name for elementary school, and when they went off to middle school they could choose whether they wanted to make the switch. “I wanted the kids to be seen for who they were,” she explains. “My oldest daughter went in with Gates; she felt like she was ready to take that name on. My son chose not to. He used French all the way through high school.”
“I just tried to keep them in the real world and point things out to them as much as possible,” she continues. “We had real discussions about how our family was different, but you shouldn’t think any more of yourself because of that.”
The Gateses had begun talking about giving away some of Bill’s fortune even before they were married, in part sparked by a trip to Africa. They had also read a Nicholas Kristof article in The New York Times about preventable malaria and tuberculosis in developing nations. This would plant the seed for much of their later work. Together, they cofounded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000. Then in 2010, with their friend Warren Buffet, they created the Giving Pledge: a vast campaign to encourage the world’s richest people to donate a majority of their wealth to charity.
It wasn’t always easy working with Bill Gates. There were times when he was said to talk over her in meetings, and she had to learn to interject (or train herself to speak up first). It was not uncommon for prime ministers or dignitaries to instinctively turn to Bill for answers—on a subject in which she was the expert. But she found ways to navigate. For instance, on funding: “I knew that some of the decisions about funding should not be made in the room in front of a group of 20 people. Those decisions should be made behind the scenes, and we should go in as a unified front, whether we disagree behind the scenes or not. So I would have to sometimes pause a meeting where people wanted a decision.” She’d say: “We’re taking this decision off the table. We’ll come back to you by the end of the week.”
French Gates founded Pivotal Ventures in 2015 to focus on work that didn’t necessarily fit within the goals of the Gates Foundation, such as increasing women’s power and influence of women on her home soil. But it has only recently become her full-time gig. Her personal life looks quite different, too. She moved out of the gargantuan mansion she never really wanted to live in (after they married, Melinda hired a new architect to redesign it) and back to Seattle proper. She lives in a neighborhood where she can once again walk to grocery stores and coffee shops. A neighbor down the road has a chicken coop.
Her kids are now out of the house, and while of course she misses them, and is immensely proud of the adults they have become, it’s actually been “pretty wonderful” having a little more time to herself. She is still very much devoted to her family—and notably, the two grandchildren who call her “Nonna” (“I’m like, we’re not even Italian?” Phoebe says)—but perhaps for the first time, she is unencumbered. She is spending her own money. She is the boss of her own company and doesn’t have to ask anyone for permission. “A woman should have her full voice, her full decision-making authority. It’s nice to have that,” she says.
French Gates marked her 60th birthday with a vacation. There was some soul-searching on her part. “Once you cross 50, you can’t ignore that you’re on the back half of life, you just can’t,” she says. “But there’s something about turning 60, and having grandchildren, that has made me incredibly reflective about, ‘What kind of world are we leaving behind?’”
This, she says, has impacted her giving. (“My granddaughter should not have less rights than I had,” she has often said.) But it has also impacted the way she lives her daily life: caring less about what people think (she’s a “recovering perfectionist”); staying active; and trying to find moments of “discovery” in the everyday. (Every year, French Gates chooses a word to guide her into the year ahead. Discovery is what she’s chosen for 2025, she tells me.) She can’t run every day like she used to, but she is skiing and kayaking, going on walks with friends, meeting with her two spiritual groups. “I feel vibrant,” she says. She launched a YouTube series, in which she interviewed famous women friends like Michelle Obama and Megan Rapinoe.
Last fall, she was linked to the entrepreneur Philip Vaughn, but, she says, dating is not her priority right now. Sure, it would be nice to have a partner someday, she tells me. “But again, I knew when I got divorced, I would be okay on my own. And I think that was the most important thing.” Which isn’t to say that this particular “transition” back to single life hasn’t been difficult. On the day we are to meet, the headlines are abuzz about the interview that Bill has given with The Times of London, in which he called his divorce from Melinda his “mistake I most regret.” Now the tabloids were asking whether the former couple were getting back together. “You’ve clearly Googled more than I have,” French Gates says, rolling her eyes. “Look, divorces are painful, and it’s not something I would wish on any family.” She says that leaving her marriage was both one of the hardest and most important things she’s ever done.
And anyway, she’s got bigger things to worry about. Like why the funding for women’s health research is so paltry. “Why do we have Viagra and Cialis and whatever else is out there, and why have we not looked at menopause, something every woman will go through?” she asks. Or getting women elected into office, not only at the federal level (French Gates is an Independent, but she endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, and according to the New York Times, donated more than $13 million to groups supporting Harris’s presidential campaign), but at the local, state, and grassroots levels, too. Or the decimation of Roe v. Wade. French Gates has long spoken in support of, and funded, contraceptive programs for women in developing countries. But for years, the Gates Foundation had a policy of remaining nonpartisan, as they had to work on both sides of the aisle. So being explicitly—and financially—in support of abortion rights in the U.S. is new for her. It’s a stance that has put her at odds with the Catholic Church, a faith she still practices.
I ask her if she’d be willing to work with the Trump administration, despite previously stating that she could not vote for him. “Look, I believe in our democracy, so no matter who gets elected, I’m going to try to find places to work together,” she says. “But we just need to wait and see. One of the worst things I could do is act too quickly.” In other words, she needs to be strategic. “I mean, my work doesn’t change,” she continues. “Might we make some slightly different decisions because of this administration? Potentially, yeah. But I will watch and wait for a bit, and then decide where strategically we’re going to act, or where I will use my voice.” And, of course, her money.
Before we part, I ask her about a section of her book in which she describes the months leading up to her decision to divorce her husband. They took a trip, just the two of them, to Santa Fe, where she deduced, from the photos on the walls, that the house they’d rented belonged to a couple who was no longer together. She found herself Googling the owners, trying to see where they’d ended up. “If, five years from now, someone ended up in your old house, Googling you,” I ask her, “what do you hope they’d find?”
“She’s thriving on the other side of a divorce,” she says, smiling. “Just thriving.”
