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Tax filings reveal $7.88 billion divorce payout to Melinda as Gates falls out of the world's top 10 richest
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Tax filings reported in January 2026 revealed that Bill Gates had paid his former wife, Melinda French Gates, nearly $7.88 billion as part of their divorce settlement. The disclosure, together with Gates's large charitable giving and his 2021 divorce, helped push his estimated net worth to roughly $104 billion — ranking him around 19th on global wealth indexes and out of the world's ten richest people for the first time in about three decades. Gates has repeatedly said he intends to give away nearly all of his fortune and fall far down the rankings as the Gates Foundation spends toward its planned 2045 closure. Melinda French Gates, who left the Foundation in 2024, was separately estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
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2026
Gates Foundation Trust Sells Off the Last of Its Microsoft Stock
In the first quarter of 2026, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust sold its remaining Microsoft shares, fully exiting a position in the very company that created Gates's fortune — capping a long, deliberate diversification away from the stock. The endowment that funds Gates's philanthropy, managed separately from its grant-making through Cascade, is now anchored instead by Berkshire Hathaway, Waste Management, railroads, and heavy-equipment makers. The sale underscored how thoroughly Gates's giving had decoupled from Microsoft's day-to-day fortunes.
2026
Gates's Charitable Endowment Is Now Led by Berkshire, Not Microsoft
By 2026, the publicly disclosed stock portfolio of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust — the endowment that funds Gates's philanthropy — was led not by Microsoft but by Berkshire Hathaway, Waste Management, Canadian National Railway, Caterpillar, and Deere. Decades of diversification, plus Warren Buffett's stock gifts, left it concentrated in railroads, waste, heavy equipment, and Buffett's conglomerate, while Microsoft — the source of the original fortune — had largely been sold down. The unglamorous, value-oriented mix reflects the long stewardship of Gates's money manager, Michael Larson, through Cascade Investment.
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