In April 2026, the Gates Foundation announced an independent external governance review led by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and two former US federal judges, tasked with examining Foundation oversight structures, donor transparency, and executive conduct policies. The Foundation simultaneously announced a 20% reduction in its global workforce — approximately 500 positions — citing the need to streamline operations. Foundation CEO Mark Suzman described the reductions as part of a 'strategic reset' unrelated to the Epstein scrutiny; critics and former staff disputed that characterization.
In March 2026, the US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability issued a subpoena to the Gates Foundation demanding internal communications, grant records, and financial documents related to Jeffrey Epstein spanning 2010–2019. The committee gave the Foundation a 30-day compliance deadline. A Gates Foundation spokesperson said the organization was 'reviewing the request and committed to cooperating fully with legitimate oversight.' The subpoena focused specifically on whether Foundation grant decisions were influenced by Epstein and whether donor privacy obligations had been used to shield Epstein's involvement.
A March 2026 Fortune investigation reported that Melanie Walker — a Gates Foundation neuroscience programme officer and personal physician to Gates — and Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft executive and close Gates associate, had maintained contact with Jeffrey Epstein beyond the period Gates claimed the relationship had ended. Walker, who had met Epstein as a student in 1992 and remained close to him, attended Epstein events through at least 2017; Sinofsky had exchanged emails with Epstein as late as 2018. The story added to scrutiny of the breadth of Gates's social circle's ties to Epstein.
On December 6, 2025, at the Universal Health Coverage High-Level Forum in Tokyo, the Gates Foundation pledged $100 million to the World Bank-hosted Global Financing Facility's 2026–2030 strategy for ending preventable deaths among women, children, and adolescents in LMICs. The pledge brings the foundation's total GFF commitment past $500 million since 2015. The GFF provides catalytic grant financing and technical assistance to strengthen LMIC health systems and expand quality access to health and nutrition services for the world's most vulnerable populations.
At the Global Summit on Health and Prosperity through Immunisation in Brussels on June 25, 2025, the Gates Foundation committed $1.6 billion to Gavi's 2026–2030 cycle — helping secure more than $9 billion of an $11.9 billion target amid sharp cuts to US global health funding. Gavi 6.0 aims to immunise at least 500 million children, save over 8 million lives, and expand malaria and HPV vaccine coverage. The Gates Foundation has contributed over $7.7 billion to Gavi since 2000, making it Gavi's largest private funder.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures backed Savor, a startup that produces butter using carbon dioxide and hydrogen — derived from atmospheric carbon and water — without any conventional agriculture, animals, or farmland. Savor's thermochemical process generates saturated fat with an identical molecular profile to dairy butter while using an estimated 99.9 percent less water and zero agricultural land. The product launched at Michelin-starred restaurants in 2025, with supermarket availability targeted for 2027, as part of Gates's broader bet on food-system decarbonisation.
A January 2024 investigation by The Guardian and Floodlight News revealed that entities connected to Bill Gates's Cascade Investment had used a network of limited liability companies — including Cottonwood Ag Management — to quietly purchase approximately 20,588 acres of Nebraska farmland valued at roughly $113 million, without disclosing the beneficial owner to local sellers or county officials. The acquisitions were part of Gates's wider strategy to become the largest private farmland owner in the United States, with holdings exceeding 269,000 acres across 18 states, managed through Cottonwood Ag Management and its parent Leading Harvest, which develops regenerative agriculture certification standards.
In an October 2024 interview with Brazilian media outlet Agência Brasil, Bill Gates expressed concern about political swings threatening Amazon protection, noting that deforestation in the Amazon risks triggering a 'tipping point' that could turn large sections of rainforest into savannah within decades — with catastrophic consequences for global rainfall patterns and biodiversity. Gates praised Brazil's deforestation enforcement under the current administration but warned that durable forest protection required structural economic alternatives for communities dependent on forest clearing.
The Gates Foundation committed $1,199,561 to Medic (formerly Medic Mobile) under grant INV-079602, supporting the organisation's Community Health Toolkit open-source platform used by frontline health workers across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The toolkit powers case management, data collection, and care coordination for community health workers serving over 27,000 health facilities globally. Medic's platform is one of the most widely deployed open-source digital health systems in low-income country primary healthcare.
In a September 2023 interview with The Times ahead of his book 'How to Avoid a Climate Disaster' press tour, Bill Gates stated that tree-planting campaigns promoted as mass climate solutions were 'complete nonsense' and 'a scam' unless accompanied by rigorous, permanent carbon accounting. Gates argued that the land required to offset global emissions through afforestation would consume an area larger than the continental United States, and that the focus should instead be on zero-carbon energy, green cement and steel, and direct air capture technologies he funds through Breakthrough Energy.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the first funding round for Graphyte, a carbon removal startup spun out of the ARPA-E-funded Rice University biomass-burial research, which compresses agricultural and forestry residues — rice hulls, sawmill waste, cotton gin trash — into dense, moisture-free blocks and buries them in dry geological formations for thousands of years. Unlike reforestation, which stores carbon temporarily in living trees, Graphyte's process is permanent and does not require ongoing land management. The company claimed a cost of under $100 per tonne at scale.
The Gates Foundation awarded Ginkgo Bioworks a grant to engineer a live cell line capable of continuously producing broadly neutralising antibodies against HIV and/or malaria from an implantable device inside the body. The approach targets the core barrier to protein therapeutic access in low-income settings: repeated high-cost injections. Ginkgo will develop an engineered cell prototype as proof of concept, combining synthetic biology expertise from its existing Gates-backed $275 million platform with the foundation's HIV/malaria programmes.
On February 2, 2022, Verdox raised $80 million led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures alongside Prelude Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital to commercialise its MIT-developed electrochemical carbon removal technology. Unlike thermal carbon capture systems requiring large amounts of heat and water, Verdox's electrochemical process selectively captures and releases CO₂ using targeted electrical energy at any atmospheric concentration, eliminating the need for heat regeneration. The technology was developed at MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and is scalable to direct air capture applications.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures co-led a $50 million Series A for Antora Energy alongside Lowercarbon Capital, funding Antora's solid carbon thermal storage blocks that absorb excess renewable electricity as heat and re-emit electricity via thermophotovoltaic cells — capable of delivering round-the-clock zero-carbon industrial heat and power. Antora subsequently raised $150 million in a 2024 Series B with continued BEV participation, bringing total funding to over $230 million. The technology also received grants from the California Energy Commission and ARPA-E.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Energy Impact Partners co-led a $22 million Series A for Rondo Energy, whose 'Heat Battery' converts surplus renewable electricity into continuous high-temperature industrial heat up to 1,500°C — targeting cement, chemicals, food processing, and water desalination. Industrial heat accounts for roughly 20 percent of global CO₂ emissions with no prior viable renewable solution. Rondo subsequently raised a $60 million Series B and secured a €75 million project-finance facility from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst and the European Investment Bank.
Cottonwood Ag Management — the entity overseeing Bill Gates's 269,000-acre US farmland portfolio — provided founding support for Leading Harvest, a nonprofit that developed a third-party sustainability certification standard for large-scale row-crop farming. Leading Harvest's standard covers soil health, water quality, biodiversity, and worker welfare across continuous-cultivation cropland; it targets institutional farmland investors seeking ESG certification analogous to FSC for timber. Critics noted that the standard does not require carbon sequestration targets or limit synthetic fertiliser use.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures led a $53 million Series B for Iron Ox, a California startup operating fully autonomous hydroponic greenhouse farms where robot arms transplant and harvest leafy greens with zero tillage and no pesticides. Indoor vertical farming produces roughly 100 times more food per acre than conventional field farming, eliminating the need to clear new agricultural land for food production — a leading driver of tropical deforestation. Iron Ox's model targets high-value salad crops grown near urban markets to reduce transport emissions alongside land-use impacts.
Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos jointly hosted a private workshop at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow bringing together food-company CEOs, agricultural ministers, and NGO leaders to align on eliminating deforestation from global commodity supply chains by 2030. The session produced a joint declaration from 12 multinational food companies committing to deforestation-free sourcing standards; the Gates Foundation subsequently provided philanthropic funding to the Forest, Agriculture and Commodity Trade (FACT) Dialogue, the multilateral forum convened by the UK government to operationalise these commitments.
Breakthrough Energy Ventures participated in a $5 million seed round for Pachama, a San Francisco-based startup using satellite imagery, lidar data, and machine learning to verify the carbon sequestration claims of forest protection projects before and after credit issuance. Pachama's platform directly addresses the fraud and double-counting problems that have undermined voluntary carbon markets; it also connects corporate buyers with verified reforestation and avoided-deforestation projects across Latin America and Africa.
In August 2020, the Gates Foundation granted EcoHealth Alliance $1.5 million over three years to provide technical assistance to India's Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying for building a national One Health platform, integrating surveillance and public health interventions across the human-animal-environment interface for zoonotic disease detection. India's One Health platform was designed to serve as a model for zoonotic spillover early warning in major emerging economies with dense animal-human contact zones.
At the UK-hosted Global Vaccine Summit in June 2020, the Gates Foundation committed $1.6 billion to Gavi's 2021–2025 strategic period, pushing cumulative foundation Gavi contributions past $4 billion. The strategy targets immunising 300 million additional children and averting 7–8 million deaths. Funding supports Gavi's digital immunisation data systems and work with African regional manufacturers to build resilient local vaccine supply chains. The summit overall raised $8.8 billion, exceeding the $7.4 billion target.
In a September 2019 interview with Axios on HBO following the New Yorker's MIT exposé, Bill Gates stated: 'I wish I hadn't had those dinners' with Epstein and 'I made a mistake in judgment' by engaging with him. Gates maintained that the meetings were solely to explore philanthropic fundraising and that he had not socialized with Epstein in any other context. He defended the Gates Foundation's conduct, stating that no foundation grant had been directed by Epstein and that the relationship had not influenced philanthropic decisions.
According to reporting by The Wall Street Journal and corroborated by CNN, Melinda Gates first consulted divorce lawyers in October 2019 — the same month The New York Times published its detailed investigation of Bill Gates's meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. Melinda told close friends she was troubled and saddened by the extent of the relationship, according to people familiar with her thinking cited by WSJ. Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce in May 2021; Melinda Gates later stated the Epstein association was a factor in her decision.
Days before his death in August 2019, Jeffrey Epstein added Boris Nikolic — Bill Gates's longtime Gates Foundation science advisor and personal friend — as an executor of his estate in a last-minute codicil to his will, signed two days before Epstein's death. Nikolic told reporters he was blindsided and would not serve. Nikolic had accompanied Gates on multiple documented meetings with Epstein, including the 2012 Oslo trip and the March 2013 flight on Epstein's jet. The will codicil became evidence in ongoing civil litigation brought by Epstein victims.
In December 2018, Breakthrough Energy Ventures led a $26 million Series A for Malta Inc. as it spun out of Alphabet's X moonshot laboratory. Malta's technology stores electricity as heat in giant tanks of molten salt at 565°C and cold in antifreeze fluid, enabling multi-day renewable energy storage at projected costs far below lithium-ion systems. Additional investors included Alfa Laval and Concord New Energy Group; Malta subsequently raised a $50 million Series B with continued BEV participation.
The Gates Foundation awarded the Task Force for Global Health $29.97 million over five years to fund the Coalition for Operational Research on Neglected Tropical Diseases (COR-NTD). The grant supported more than 180 operational research studies with over 100 international partners in 55 countries, targeting remaining barriers to eliminating lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis, soil-transmitted helminths, and trachoma. COR-NTD's evidence directly informs WHO NTD programme strategy and country-level programme adaptations.
CEPI — co-founded at Davos 2017 with a $100 million Gates Foundation contribution — awarded up to $25 million to develop HeV-sG-V, a recombinant subunit Nipah virus vaccine. In March 2020, HeV-sG-V became the first Nipah vaccine to enter Phase 1 human trials, enrolling 192 adults at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. Results confirmed dose-dependent immune responses with no serious adverse events, establishing immunogenicity proof for potential reactive deployment against a pathogen with up to 75 percent case fatality rate in humans.
In May 2017, the Gates Foundation funded PATH to partner with South Africa's Biovac Institute to develop a polyvalent conjugate GBS vaccine, making Biovac only the third company globally — and the first in a developing country — to pursue an original GBS conjugate vaccine. More than half of all GBS newborn deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. The partnership established local LMIC manufacturing capability as central to ensuring any approved vaccine reaches the mothers and newborns who need it most.
In 2017, the World Mosquito Program — supported by the Gates Foundation through grants to Monash University — began large-scale releases of Wolbachia-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes across Medellín, Bello, and Itagüí in Colombia's Aburrá Valley. A peer-reviewed study in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases found dengue incidence fell by 95–97 percent in treated areas. At peak, the Medellín factory produced 30 million Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes per week — the largest Wolbachia mosquito factory in the world at the time.
Bill Gates invested in Impossible Foods' $75 million Series B funding round. Impossible Foods produces plant-based burgers using soy leghemoglobin — a genetically engineered protein — to replicate the taste and texture of beef. Independent life-cycle analyses estimate that Impossible products require 87 percent less greenhouse gas, 95 percent less land, and 74 percent less water than conventional beef per kilogram of protein. Gates's stake aligned with his broader thesis that shifting protein systems is one of the highest-leverage climate interventions available.
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In 2016, the Gates Foundation joined the Wellcome Trust, USAID, and the UK Government in committing $18 million in combined emergency funding to accelerate the World Mosquito Program's Wolbachia releases in Zika-affected countries. Funding enabled rapid scale-up in Brazil, Colombia, and other nations during the Zika outbreak. Research shows Wolbachia reduces Zika virus replication in Aedes aegypti by approximately 40–60 percent, adding a Zika-blocking layer atop the established dengue-suppression effect of the technology.
In September 2016, the Gates Foundation awarded Target Malaria an additional $35 million after the programme published landmark research in Nature Biotechnology showing a CRISPR gene drive that eliminated caged Anopheles gambiae populations in 7–11 generations. The funding enabled Target Malaria to scale up contained cage trials in the UK and begin regulatory and community engagement in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, and Uganda — required steps before any open-environment gene drive release on the African continent.
The Gates Foundation, alongside USAID and other donors, funded Digital Square — a global initiative housed at PATH — to improve how governments design, procure, and pay for digital health technologies. Digital Square promotes interoperability standards, funds development of open-source global goods (including OpenHIE, OpenMRS, and OpenLMIS), and helps countries avoid vendor lock-in for their health information infrastructure. Its work directly shapes the surveillance plumbing of health systems in more than 40 low- and middle-income countries, determining how disease data flows from community health workers to national dashboards.
Gates Foundation-funded Janicki Bioenergy deployed its Omni Processor in Dakar, Senegal in 2015, a machine treating fecal sludge from 50,000–100,000 people and converting it into drinking water, electricity, and ash — eliminating costly open dumping. Bill Gates famously drank a glass of water produced by the device on camera, calling it 'delicious', and blogged about its deployment as a potential citywide sanitation model for low-income countries. The Foundation funded both R&D at the Washington State facility and the Dakar field pilot via a grant to Senegal's National Sanitation Office.
The Gates Foundation awarded Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health $525,000 to evaluate a Ceres Nanosciences nanotrap-based saliva test for malaria parasite detection. A non-invasive saliva test would transform disease surveillance in sub-Saharan Africa by enabling frequent community-level screening without blood draws or laboratory infrastructure. The team aimed to validate sensitivity and specificity under high-transmission field conditions as a prerequisite for scale.
The Gates Foundation committed up to $75 million to establish CHAMPS (Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance), a minimum 20-year project to gather rigorous, laboratory-confirmed data on why children are dying in high-mortality regions of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Led by Emory University's Global Health Institute with CDC technical support, CHAMPS deploys minimally invasive tissue sampling and molecular diagnostics to determine precise causes of death in children under five — data that had never existed at population scale before. The network can be rapidly repurposed for outbreak investigation during disease emergencies.
In October and November 2014, MIT's Media Lab received a $2 million donation listed in internal records as anonymous but routed through Jeffrey Epstein, who personally delivered the funds and personally solicited the donation from a donor he did not name. The arrangement was revealed in a September 2019 New Yorker investigation by Ronan Farrow and is corroborated by MIT internal emails released following an independent review. MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, who had also received personal funds from Epstein, resigned after publication. The Gates Foundation's involvement was indirect — Bill Gates was among the donors Epstein claimed to be intermediating — but the episode exposed how Epstein leveraged philanthropic relationships for social credibility.
The Gates Foundation committed $14.5 million to The Nature Conservancy to integrate conservation goals into agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa, mapping high-conservation-value land and embedding forest protection targets into national agricultural policies in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zambia. The grant supported TNC's NatureVest initiative linking conservation finance to smallholder supply chains, aiming to demonstrate that expanding food production and protecting forests are complementary objectives.
With Gates Foundation support, Gavi established a global emergency stockpile of oral cholera vaccine (OCV) managed by the International Coordinating Group, making doses available within 72 hours of a confirmed outbreak. Prior to the stockpile, OCV was unavailable for outbreak response due to manufacturing constraints. Gates funding helped negotiate a tiered price from EuBiologics and Shanchol producers at approximately $1.60–$1.85 per dose for Gavi-eligible countries, enabling deployment in Yemen, Zimbabwe, and DRC crises.
In September 2013, Bill Gates had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein in New York City, according to reporting by The New York Times based on emails and calendar records. By this date, Epstein had served his 2008 Florida sentence and been registered as a sex offender in multiple states. The dinner was one of several documented in-person meetings between the two men over a three-year period from 2011 to 2014. Gates acknowledged the meetings but said he had been unaware of the full extent of Epstein's crimes.
Investigative reporting by NBC News and The New York Times revealed that between 2013 and 2015, senior Gates Foundation officials forwarded internal programme emails to Jeffrey Epstein — including materials related to the Foundation's polio eradication efforts in Pakistan marked as sensitive — as part of an effort to keep Epstein engaged as a potential fundraising conduit. Foundation spokesperson Bridgitt Arnold confirmed that Epstein received internal communications but said they were shared inappropriately and without senior leadership's authorisation.
Beginning in 2013 and continuing through 2014, the Gates Foundation made grants to the Institute for Protein Innovation (IPI) at Harvard — a scientific initiative in whose founding Jeffrey Epstein played an orchestrating role, according to internal Harvard communications cited by NYT and later confirmed in a Harvard report. Epstein had cultivated relationships with Harvard faculty and helped broker IPI's early philanthropic support. The Foundation's grants were consistent with its agricultural and nutrition portfolio; they were not made because of Epstein's involvement, but Epstein subsequently used the relationship to claim proximity to the Gates Foundation.
In August 2012, Bill Gates traveled to Oslo, Norway, with Jeffrey Epstein — along with Gates Foundation science advisor Boris Nikolic — where they met with Norwegian scientists and businesspeople. Emails reviewed by The New York Times showed that Epstein organized the itinerary. The visit included meetings at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters; Epstein framed the trip as positioning Gates for a Nobel Peace Prize nomination by cultivating the Norwegian scientific community.
On January 30, 2012, the Gates Foundation announced a five-year $363 million commitment as the lead funder of the London Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases, signed alongside WHO, 13 pharmaceutical companies, DFID, USAID, and the World Bank. The pledge targeted control or elimination of Guinea worm, lymphatic filariasis, river blindness, trachoma, and schistosomiasis. By 2020, trachoma was eliminated as a public health problem in 10 countries and preventive treatment coverage had more than doubled across all five diseases.
The Gates Foundation provided $46.1 million to Marie Stopes International (now MSI Reproductive Choices) as part of the London Summit on Family Planning commitments. Marie Stopes is one of the world's largest providers of voluntary contraceptive and reproductive health services, operating clinics and community outreach in 37 countries. Subsequent Gates-funded collaboration with Global Affairs Canada supported MSI's Smart Start programme, reaching 48 rural districts in Ethiopia with family planning outreach teams and expanding access to implants, IUDs, and injectable contraceptives for women who had never previously accessed formal health services.
In May 2011, Bill Gates dined with Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Summers (former Harvard president and Treasury Secretary), and Jes Staley (then JPMorgan Private Bank chief executive) at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse to discuss creating a multibillion-dollar charitable fund that would pool contributions from ultra-wealthy clients introduced by Epstein. According to The New York Times and Bloomberg reporting on Epstein's JPMorgan relationship, Epstein positioned himself as the broker for this philanthropic vehicle. The fund was never established; Jes Staley later faced regulatory action over his relationship with Epstein.
In March 2011, Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein interacted at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and subsequently scheduled a series of follow-up meetings, according to NYT reporting corroborated by Gates Foundation internal emails reviewed by journalists. The TED encounter deepened the relationship and led to Epstein visiting the Gates Foundation's Seattle headquarters, where he met with programme officers. Gates's office later described these interactions as attempts to use Epstein's access to billionaires to raise philanthropic funding.
According to reporting by The New York Times in October 2019, Bill Gates met Jeffrey Epstein for the first time at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse on East 71st Street in January 2011 — two years after Epstein's 2008 Florida conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Gates attended alongside senior Gates Foundation executives including Boris Nikolic (science advisor) and the Foundation's chief financial officer. The meeting was arranged to explore whether Epstein could help Gates and the Foundation solicit large philanthropic contributions from ultra-wealthy donors for global health initiatives.
The Gates Foundation, through its long-term funding relationship with the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation, supported research into inhaled tuberculosis vaccine delivery systems designed to induce mucosal and lung immunity directly at the site of TB infection. Conventional injectable TB vaccines do not produce the lung-resident T cell responses that researchers believe are necessary to prevent pulmonary disease. Aeras's inhaled delivery programme explored adenoviral vector and lipid-nanoparticle formats that could deliver antigens via aerosol or dry-powder inhalation without injection.
The Gates Foundation awarded a $100,000 Grand Challenges Explorations grant to Jason Rasgon at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute to develop a pathogen that causes malaria-transmitting Anopheles mosquitoes to die after approximately ten days — shorter than the time needed for Plasmodium parasites to mature enough to be transmitted. Because the mechanism targets the mosquito rather than the parasite, it is inherently harder for resistance to evolve than with conventional insecticides or drugs.
The Gates Foundation awarded Oxitec $5 million through its Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative to advance field trials of self-limiting Aedes aegypti mosquitoes for dengue and Zika suppression. The OX513A Friendly Mosquito was subsequently deployed in trials in Brazil, the Cayman Islands, and Malaysia, achieving wild population suppression exceeding 90 percent in test zones. Success of this early grant directly seeded Oxitec's broader tropical disease mosquito-control platform and informed the foundation's decade-long bet on genetic insect biocontrol.
The Gates Foundation awarded $23 million to the World Cocoa Foundation to improve cocoa productivity among smallholder farmers in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria. By raising yields on existing farmland through improved varieties and agronomic practices, the programme aimed to relieve pressure to clear forest for new cocoa acreage — West Africa's largest driver of deforestation — while increasing incomes for the 6 million smallholder families whose livelihoods depend on cocoa.
Beginning in 2009, the Gates Foundation committed $60 million to Monash University to support the World Mosquito Program (WMP), which introduces Wolbachia bacteria-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes into communities to block dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya transmission. Wolbachia prevents dengue virus replication inside the mosquito, and released populations self-sustain by displacing wild uninfected mosquitoes across breeding seasons. The programme subsequently expanded to operations in twelve countries across Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific.
The Gates Foundation awarded $50 million over five years to Population Services International (PSI) to scale voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) programmes in Swaziland, Zambia, and other Southern African countries. Clinical trials had demonstrated that VMMC reduces female-to-male HIV transmission by 60 percent, making it one of the most cost-effective HIV prevention interventions available. PSI's Gates-funded VMMC programmes trained surgical teams, ran demand-generation campaigns, and achieved hundreds of thousands of procedures annually at safe government sites.
In March 2008, the Gates Foundation and Howard G. Buffett Foundation jointly funded the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) partnership with a combined $47 million grant to the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. The public-private partnership brought together CIMMYT, Monsanto — contributing proprietary drought-tolerance genes royalty-free — and national research systems in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa to develop both conventional and genetically modified drought-tolerant maize varieties for smallholder farmers in some of the world's most food-insecure regions.
On December 5, 2008, the Gates Foundation announced a $40 million challenge grant — the largest in Carter Center history — comprising an $8 million outright gift and a 1:1 matching grant of up to $32 million for the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. At the time, fewer than 5,000 cases remained globally. The grant accelerated surveillance, water treatment, and case containment; only 13 human cases were reported worldwide in 2022 — down from 3.5 million in 1986 — making Guinea worm the first parasitic disease on the verge of eradication without a vaccine or medicine.
The Gates Foundation created the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) in 2008 through the Global Good Fund to develop open-source, high-fidelity epidemic simulation tools for malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, polio, and dengue. IDM's EMOD individual-based modelling platform is released publicly and directly informs BMGF grantees' vaccination strategies in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2020, IDM released Covasim — a Python COVID-19 agent-based model — adopted by state governments for pandemic decision-making and researchers worldwide.
The Gates Foundation granted $5.3 million to the Rainforest Alliance to expand its sustainable agriculture certification programme for smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, linking responsible land management to market access. The grant supported training and certification for cocoa, coffee, and tea farmers to meet international sustainability standards, reducing deforestation pressure by making forest protection economically viable for smallholders operating at the forest frontier.
The Gates Foundation granted $105 million to the University of Washington to establish the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) — an independent global health research centre tasked with producing comprehensive, comparable data on the world's most pressing health challenges. IHME's flagship output, the Global Burden of Disease study, became the most widely cited source of data on disease prevalence, mortality, risk factors, and health system performance across 204 countries, fundamentally reshaping how governments, donors, and researchers allocate global health resources.
Bill Gates began personally funding the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (FICER), channelling at least $4.5 million over three years to Harvard University researchers studying solar geoengineering — particularly the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), which proposed releasing calcium carbonate aerosols at high altitude to reflect sunlight and slow warming. Gates's backing made Harvard's programme the best-funded academic geoengineering research effort in the world and placed him at the centre of international debate over deliberate climate intervention.
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In December 2006, the Gates Foundation announced five grants totalling $46.7 million to the Carter Center, Imperial College London, and the Task Force for Child Survival and Development to coordinate integrated mass drug administration against trachoma, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis, and soil-transmitted helminths. The grants supported coordinated operational research across more than 20 countries and established the evidence base for the integrated NTD delivery model subsequently adopted by WHO as its global standard approach to controlling all five diseases simultaneously.
The Gates Foundation awarded PATH a five-year, $27.8 million grant to conduct HPV vaccine demonstration programs in India, Peru, Uganda, and Vietnam. The project generated the evidence base governments in low-income countries needed to introduce HPV vaccines and developed delivery strategies for reaching adolescent girls without schools-based health infrastructure. GSK and Merck provided vaccines for the demonstration projects, which were the first large-scale HPV vaccination programs outside high-income countries.
The Gates Foundation co-funded the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa (DTMA) programme, implemented by CIMMYT and IITA across 13 countries — Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The programme developed and distributed drought-tolerant maize varieties capable of yielding 20–30 percent more than conventional varieties under moderate drought. By its close in 2015, DTMA varieties were growing on more than 1 million hectares, benefiting an estimated 40 million farmers and generating $160–200 million in additional grain value annually — reducing the pressure to clear new land as climate-related yield losses mounted.
The Gates Foundation awarded HarvestPlus $6 million to introduce orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP) — rich in beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A — into the diets of the undernourished in Uganda and Mozambique, where virtually all traditionally grown sweet potato varieties are white or yellow and deliver negligible vitamin A. Within two years of the project's launch, approximately 50 percent of sweet potatoes in target communities were orange-fleshed varieties. Vitamin A deficiency causes preventable blindness in up to 500,000 children annually.
The Gates Foundation awarded $9 million to a research consortium led by Germany's GBF and the Institut Pasteur in Paris for hepatitis C and HIV vaccine development, selected from more than 1,500 applications across 75 countries in the Grand Challenges in Global Health competition. The project used humanised mouse models to study HCV infection and vaccine-mediated immune responses. This was among the foundation's earliest investments in hepatitis C vaccine science for a disease affecting 58 million people globally for which no vaccine yet exists.
The Gates Foundation provided foundational and cumulative grant funding totalling $75 million to Target Malaria, a non-profit research consortium based at Imperial College London, to develop CRISPR-based gene drive technology for malaria mosquito control. Target Malaria installs a gene drive into Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes that renders females sterile, spreading the modification through wild populations faster than natural inheritance. The foundation's investment made Target Malaria the best-funded gene drive programme in the world.
In 2004, the Gates Foundation co-funded the Pediatric Dengue Vaccine Initiative (PDVI), hosted at the International Vaccine Institute and implemented with PATH and WHO, to accelerate dengue vaccine development. PDVI provided Sanofi Pasteur with epidemiological and immunological data supporting clinical development of CYD-TDV, which became Dengvaxia — the first licensed dengue vaccine in 2015. Dengue infects 390 million people annually, with the burden falling disproportionately on children in tropical regions.
The Gates Foundation awarded $82.9 million to the Aeras Global TB Vaccine Foundation, described at the time as the largest-ever single grant for tuberculosis vaccine research. The funding more than doubled global annual TB vaccine R&D spending and enabled Aeras to run clinical trials of multiple vaccine candidates in South Africa, Uganda, and other high-burden countries. The grant established TB vaccine development as a serious biomedical priority after decades of neglect.
The Gates Foundation awarded $35 million to Zambia's national malaria control program to scale up insecticide-treated bed net distribution and expand access to artemisinin-based combination therapy across the country. Zambia served as a test case for whether a comprehensive national malaria program could achieve dramatic reductions in transmission by simultaneously deploying multiple interventions. The program contributed to a significant reduction in malaria deaths in Zambia over the following decade.
The Gates Foundation awarded $25 million (half of a four-year $50 million budget) to HarvestPlus, a global initiative led by CGIAR to develop and distribute biofortified staple crops — varieties of rice, wheat, maize, cassava, sweet potato, and beans bred to contain higher levels of zinc, iron, and vitamin A. Biofortification addresses micronutrient deficiencies in populations where diet diversity is limited without requiring dietary change, supplement infrastructure, or food processing. HarvestPlus biofortified crops have since been adopted by more than 50 million farm families in Africa and Asia.
The Gates Foundation committed $168 million across three concentrated malaria research grants covering vaccine development, new drug candidates, and innovative mosquito control. The investment helped catalyse a near-sixfold increase in global malaria funding over the decade that followed — with malaria cases and deaths beginning to fall substantially from 2005 onward for the first time in decades. Researchers credited the influx of private philanthropic capital with re-energising a field that had been chronically underfunded relative to its disease burden.
Gates's private investment vehicle, Cascade Investment LLC, began acquiring agricultural land in Washington State and the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s, structured through limited liability companies in a manner consistent with Cascade's broader strategy of low-profile, long-horizon asset accumulation. The purchases were not disclosed at the time and only became known through investigative reporting and county property-record analysis in the following decade.
The Gates Foundation awarded $30 million to Imperial College London to establish the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), the first large-scale programme to deliver praziquantel mass drug administration across six African countries — Uganda, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Zambia. Led by Professor Alan Fenwick, SCI partnered with WHO and Harvard School of Public Health to design evidence-based treatment protocols targeting the 200 million people infected with schistosomiasis globally. SCI's model became the template for integrated NTD programmes worldwide.
By 2002, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's cumulative committed grants since its founding had surpassed $1 billion — a milestone reached within just two years of the Foundation's formal establishment. This total represented an unprecedented concentration of private philanthropic capital in global health and education. The milestone was cited internationally as evidence that private philanthropy could operate at a scale previously associated only with government aid budgets and multilateral development banks.
The Gates Foundation launched comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention grant programs across sub-Saharan Africa, with commitments ultimately exceeding $350 million. The program funded HIV vaccine research, behavior-change communication campaigns, prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and expanded access to antiretroviral therapies. These investments were among the largest private contributions to the HIV/AIDS response and helped establish the evidence base and delivery infrastructure that later informed PEPFAR — the U.S. government's landmark $15 billion AIDS initiative.
The Gates Foundation supported PATH's Uniject programme, funding field deployment of the Uniject prefilled, single-dose injection device for hepatitis B birth-dose vaccination in Indonesia, Senegal, and other countries. The Uniject device requires no vial, no syringe assembly, and no reconstitution — enabling community health workers with minimal training to safely administer vaccines in homes and village settings without cold chain access at the time of delivery. PATH estimated Uniject-based hepatitis B birth-dose programmes prevented an estimated 5.5 million deaths over 20 years.
The Gates Foundation co-created the Measles Initiative — later renamed the Measles and Rubella Initiative — with the American Red Cross, CDC, UNICEF, and WHO, mobilising over $200 million to fund vaccination campaigns across more than 40 African and 3 Asian countries. The initiative reduced global measles deaths by 99 percent in its first decade of operation. Gates funding also supported development of a microneedle patch delivering measles-rubella vaccine without refrigeration or needles, tested in The Gambia.
The Gates Foundation awarded $70 million over ten years to establish the Meningitis Vaccine Project — a joint venture of PATH and WHO — to develop, license, and introduce a low-cost Group A meningococcal conjugate vaccine (MenAfriVac) specifically for the sub-Saharan meningitis belt. The vaccine was introduced in Burkina Faso in 2010 at $0.50 per dose and was the first vaccine manufactured specifically for Africa. By 2016, more than 260 million people across 21 African countries had been vaccinated, virtually eliminating epidemic Group A meningitis from the continent.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation made an initial $750 million commitment to establish the Vaccine Fund — the financial engine that became Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance — at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The pledge was the largest single philanthropic donation for vaccines in history at the time. By 2024, cumulative Gates Foundation contributions to Gavi had exceeded $4.1 billion, helping immunise nearly 1 billion children and preventing an estimated 18 million deaths.
In its first full year as the merged Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the organization disbursed over $554 million in global health grants — a level of single-year philanthropic spending unprecedented among private charitable foundations at the time. The disbursements funded vaccine development, malaria control, HIV/AIDS prevention, and maternal health programs in low-income countries. The scale of giving immediately repositioned the Foundation as one of the most influential non-governmental actors in global public health.
Gates traveled to New Delhi to visit vaccination clinics and personally support the final phase of India's polio eradication effort. The visit drew significant media attention to the campaign and demonstrated the Gates Foundation's hands-on engagement beyond grant-making. India was one of the last strongholds of wild poliovirus, and Gates's direct involvement helped maintain political will and donor momentum. India was ultimately declared polio-free in 2014 — one of the Gates Foundation's proudest achievements.
The Gates Foundation awarded $2 million to the International Rescue Committee to strengthen and enlarge the IRC's health program for refugees around the world. The grant funded expansion of health services — including primary care, maternal health, and disease surveillance — in refugee camps across Africa, Asia, and the Balkans. It was one of the Gates Foundation's earliest grants to a humanitarian organisation and established the IRC as a long-term partner in the Foundation's refugee health work.
In 1999, the Gates Foundation committed $1.18 billion in global health grants — a single-year total exceeding the annual public health budgets of many mid-sized nations. The unprecedented scale of philanthropic commitment galvanized governments and multilateral institutions to increase their own investments in diseases primarily affecting low-income countries. This year's grants heavily seeded the founding commitments to GAVI, polio eradication, malaria research, and tuberculosis drug development.
The Gates Library Foundation was reorganized and renamed the Gates Learning Foundation to reflect a broadened mission extending beyond library technology access to encompass wider educational systems and opportunities. The new focus included secondary education reform and access to higher education for underserved communities. The Gates Learning Foundation and the William H. Gates Foundation were subsequently merged in January 2000 to create the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Microsoft opened Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) in Beijing, establishing what became one of the most productive computer science research labs in the world. The lab recruited leading Chinese academics and produced foundational work in computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning. MSRA alumni went on to lead major Chinese technology companies — earning the lab the nickname 'the cradle of Chinese AI.' By 2023 it had published more than 6,000 peer-reviewed papers.
The Gates Library Foundation expanded its free computer and internet access program from the United States into Canada, ultimately equipping approximately 1,400 Canadian public libraries with around 4,000 computers. The initiative brought internet access to rural and low-income communities across Canada that previously had no other means of connectivity. It was one of the largest private investments in public library technology infrastructure in Canadian history, complementing the U.S. program that placed over 22,000 computers in roughly 4,500 American libraries.
The U.S. Department of Justice and twenty state attorneys general filed antitrust suits against Microsoft, alleging it had illegally maintained its Windows monopoly and suppressed competition in the browser market. Gates testified under deposition for three days, and the trial ran for 207 days of testimony. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson initially ordered Microsoft split into two companies; that remedy was overturned on appeal and Microsoft settled in 2001, reshaping how it conducted business for years afterward.
Gates created the Gates Library Foundation — later the Gates Learning Foundation — to bridge the digital divide in American public libraries. The program donated over $250 million in computers, software, and internet connectivity to U.S. public libraries, with particular focus on libraries serving low-income communities. By 2003, the initiative had connected 99 percent of U.S. public libraries to the internet and trained over 7,000 library staff. This effort brought free internet access to millions of Americans who otherwise lacked it at home, making it one of the most impactful domestic technology equity programs in U.S. history. The foundation later merged into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Microsoft acquired Hotmail for an estimated $400 million, making it the company's largest acquisition to that date. Hotmail had launched only 18 months earlier and already had 8.5 million subscribers — the largest webmail service in the world. Gates recognized web-based email as a strategic asset and rebranded the service MSN Hotmail. It eventually evolved into Outlook.com, which now serves more than 400 million users.
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Microsoft launched the official Chinese-language edition of Windows 95 in a ceremony at Beijing's Forbidden City. By the end of 1995 the company had established 300 authorized dealers and 30 training centers across China. Despite rampant software piracy that limited direct revenue, the launch established Microsoft's brand with Chinese consumers and corporations at a critical moment in the country's rapid PC market growth.
Bill Gates visited China and was received with diplomatic protocol typically reserved for foreign heads of state, meeting privately with President Jiang Zemin at a state resort. The visit reflected the Chinese government's strategic interest in Microsoft's role in China's technology modernization and cemented the relationship that would underpin Microsoft's expansion through the late 1990s and 2000s.
Bill Gates established the William H. Gates Foundation, named after his father, as the direct precursor to today's Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Focused on global health and education, it began the philanthropic infrastructure that would grow into the world's largest private charitable foundation. The William H. Gates Foundation operated alongside the Gates Learning Foundation before the two merged in January 2000 to form the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with a combined endowment of $28 billion.
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 1.0 and bundled it with Windows 95, directly challenging Netscape Navigator's dominance of the early web. Gates had authored his famous 'Internet Tidal Wave' memo just months earlier, and IE's bundling strategy rapidly eroded Netscape's market share — rising from zero to over 90% by the early 2000s. The tactic was central to the landmark U.S. antitrust case United States v. Microsoft, in which the DOJ argued that bundling a free browser with the OS constituted illegal monopoly maintenance. The browser wars reshaped how software was distributed, priced, and bundled for a generation.
Gates established Cascade Investment LLC as his private investment vehicle to manage his personal wealth outside of Microsoft. Under the long-tenured management of Michael Larson, Cascade diversified aggressively into real estate, hospitality (becoming a major stakeholder in Four Seasons Hotels and AutoNation), agriculture, and infrastructure. Cascade's patient, value-oriented strategy has grown Gates's non-Microsoft fortune substantially and allowed him to fund charitable commitments at scale. The firm operates with exceptional discretion and is one of the most influential family investment offices in the world.
Bill Gates married Melinda French, a Microsoft product manager he had met at a company dinner in 1987, on New Year's Day on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Gates famously chartered every helicopter on the island for the weekend to prevent photographers from accessing the ceremony. Their marriage produced three children — Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe — and became the foundation for decades of shared philanthropic work through the Gates Foundation.
Gates joined Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway as an independent board director, cementing one of the most consequential personal friendships in the history of American capitalism. Over the following decades, Buffett and Gates became the primary architects of the Giving Pledge, collectively redirecting hundreds of billions of dollars toward global philanthropy. Gates served on the Berkshire board for 24 years before stepping down in 2020 to concentrate on the Gates Foundation. Their relationship transformed how the world's wealthiest individuals think about charitable giving.
Microsoft Encarta was the world's first mass-market multimedia encyclopedia delivered on CD-ROM, developed under Gates's product vision. It combined text with photographs, audio clips, video, and interactive animations in a way no print encyclopedia could match. Encarta sold over 100 million copies across its lifetime and was the dominant home reference product of the 1990s. Its commercial success demonstrated the viability of the CD-ROM as a software distribution medium and effectively ended the era of door-to-door encyclopedia sales, with Encyclopaedia Britannica eventually halting its print edition in 2012.
Windows NT was Microsoft's first 32-bit operating system built from the ground up for enterprise reliability, developed under Gates's strategic direction with architect Dave Cutler. Unlike the consumer Windows line, NT used a fully protected memory model, supported symmetric multiprocessing, and was designed for network servers and corporate workstations. It became the technological foundation for every subsequent Windows release — Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 10, and 11 all descend directly from the NT kernel, making it one of the most consequential software architecture decisions in computing history.
President George H.W. Bush awarded Gates the National Medal of Technology and Innovation — the United States' highest honor for technological achievement — in recognition of his contributions to the personal computing industry and his role in developing software that brought computers to mainstream consumers and businesses. The medal is awarded by the President of the United States to individuals who have made lasting contributions to America's competitiveness, quality of life, and leadership in technology.
Gates established Microsoft Research as a dedicated basic-research division, modeled on Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. The lab recruited world-class computer scientists to work without product deadlines, producing foundational advances in natural language processing, computer vision, cryptography, and machine learning. Microsoft Research became one of the world's premier academic-style computing laboratories, whose work directly shaped products from Bing and Cortana to Azure AI. It has published thousands of peer-reviewed papers and produced multiple Turing Award recipients.
Windows 3.0 was Microsoft's breakthrough graphical operating system, selling over 2 million copies in its first six months on the market. It introduced the Program Manager, File Manager, and a vastly improved memory model that made it practical on standard PC hardware. The release marked the first time Windows achieved genuine mainstream commercial success, decisively outpacing IBM's competing OS/2 and cementing Microsoft's dominance in the PC software market.
Gates founded Corbis (originally Interactive Home Systems) as a personal venture to build a comprehensive digital image archive for the anticipated era of digital displays and electronic publishing. Over two decades, Corbis amassed the world's largest privately held photography collection — including the historic Bettmann Archive of 11 million images spanning over 150 years — along with rights to works by major photographic agencies. The company pioneered commercial digital image licensing. In 2016, Corbis sold its content assets to Visual China Group, with the Bettmann Archive now managed by Getty Images.
Microsoft released Office 1.0 for the Apple Macintosh, bundling Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into a single discounted package for the first time. The product was later expanded to Windows and quickly became the standard productivity suite for businesses worldwide. Microsoft Office and its successor Microsoft 365 remained the company's highest-revenue product line for more than three decades, generating hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative revenue.
At the age of 31, Bill Gates became the youngest self-made billionaire in history, according to Forbes magazine, with a net worth of approximately $1.25 billion derived almost entirely from his Microsoft equity stake. Gates had kept his own salary deliberately modest while allowing Microsoft's market capitalization to compound following its 1986 IPO. The milestone made him a global symbol of entrepreneurial success in the technology industry.
Microsoft went public on the NASDAQ at $21 per share, valuing the company at $778 million and raising $61 million. The stock closed its first day at $27.75. The IPO made Gates an instant multimillionaire and created a reported 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees and early investors over the following decade. It is regarded as one of the most consequential technology IPOs of the twentieth century.
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Microsoft released Windows 1.0, its first graphical operating environment for IBM-compatible PCs, running on top of MS-DOS. The release introduced overlapping windows, drop-down menus, and mouse support to a mass-market personal computer audience. Although critics noted its limitations at launch, Windows 1.0 established the product line that would eventually run on the majority of personal computers worldwide.
Microsoft signed a deal with IBM to supply an operating system for the upcoming IBM Personal Computer. Microsoft acquired 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000, adapted it as MS-DOS, and crucially retained the rights to license the OS to other hardware manufacturers. This decision became the foundation of Microsoft's dominance over the PC operating system market for the following two decades.
Gates enrolled at Harvard College in 1973, studying mathematics and computer science, before dropping out in his sophomore year to co-found Microsoft with Paul Allen. The decision came after Allen showed him a magazine cover story on the MITS Altair 8800 and both men believed the window to commercialize a BASIC interpreter would close if they waited. Gates later said he was always confident he could return to finish his degree, and Harvard awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws in 2007.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico after writing a BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800. The pair developed the interpreter without ever having access to a real Altair, using a software emulator running on a Harvard PDP-10. The company was originally registered as 'Micro-Soft' and would go on to define the personal computing era.
At age 17, Bill Gates and Paul Allen built Traf-O-Data, a system that read raw data from roadway traffic counters and produced reports for traffic engineers. The product earned approximately $20,000 and gave Gates his first experience turning a software project into a commercial sale. It also informed the business instincts he would apply at Microsoft three years later.
At age 13, Bill Gates wrote his first software program — a tic-tac-toe game in BASIC — on a General Electric time-sharing terminal at the Lakeside School in Seattle. The Mothers' Club had sold rummage-sale proceeds to fund the terminal, giving Gates and Paul Allen their first exposure to interactive computing. Gates later recalled that accessing the computer was the pivotal experience that set the direction of his life.