09/01/2026
American billionaire Bill Gates has paid about $8 billion to his ex-wife Melinda French Gates’s charity, five years after their split amid revelations about his affairs with other women. The New York Times reported that Gates transferred $7.88 billion to Melinda French Gates’s Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation in 2024, a sum described as one of the largest public donations on record. The figure appeared in a recent tax filing, which provided the first detailed financial terms of the couple’s 2021 separation. Melinda stepped down from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in May 2024. Despite leaving the foundation, she had suggested that her ex donate $12.5 billion to a new charitable foundation she planned to create. A representative for Pivotal told the Times that the $12.5 billion agreement had been fulfilled, and the nearly $8 billion donation was part of that agreement. Melinda established the Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation in 2022, a year after the divorce, and by the end of 2023 it reportedly had $604 million in assets. The couple, who were married for 27 years, announced their divorce in 2021, a settlement that has been described in media as one of the most expensive in history. Melinda later received approximately $76 billion in assets. In the months that followed, details emerged about Gates’s conduct, including disclosures of an affair with a Microsoft employee. The employee reportedly wrote a letter to Microsoft’s board in 2019 describing the affair, which began in 2000 and asked that Melinda “read it.” Microsoft’s board reportedly found the relationship inappropriate, and Gates resigned from the board in March 2020 as the investigation continued. Subsequent reports
