Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates paid his ex-wife Melinda French Gates nearly $8 billion as part of the settlement from the former couple’s 2021 divorce.
The $7.88 billion payout was revealed in new tax filings and first reported by The New York Times in its DealBook Newsletter on Friday.
The money shows up as a 2024 donation to French Gates’ Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation and is called “one of the largest charitable contributions ever publicly recorded” by the Times.
French Gates announced in May 2024 that she was resigning as co-chair of the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now just Gates Foundation). She left the philanthropic organization with $12.5 billion for her own initiatives as part of her divorce agreement with Gates, and said at the time that she would commit that money to her work “on behalf of women and families.”
Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation was established in 2022, a year after the divorce. Between 2022-2024, the foundation gave more than $540 million in charitable grants.
The Times noted that the balance of the agreement — about $4.6 billion — could still be coming and would show up in 2025 tax filings later this year. It’s also possible that the missing amount “was not given to a charitable foundation, but to an entity, such as French Gates’s limited-liability company, Pivotal Ventures, that does not file a tax return,” the Times reported.
Pivotal confirmed to GeekWire that the $12.5 billion agreement has been fulfilled.
GeekWire reached out to representatives for Gates and will update when we hear back.
Gates and French Gates announced the decision to end their 27-year marriage in May 2021. The Microsoft co-founder began dating Melinda French after she started at Microsoft in 1987. The two married on Jan. 1, 1994, raised three children together and grew into one of the world’s richest and most influential pairings.
Gates is 13th on the Forbes Billionaire List with a net worth of $108 billion. French Gates is No. 77 on the list with a net worth of $29.4 billion.
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