Bill Gates is doling out his fortune much sooner than we thought.
The Microsoft cofounder’s Gates Foundation has pledged to give away $200 billion by 2025, when the organization will shutter its doors. That’s about 99 percent of Gates’s fortune, Bloomberg reported. In its original timeline, the nonprofit would have closed 20 years after the billionaire’s death. Currently, the 69-year-old Gates is the fifth-richest person in the world, with $168 billion to his name, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.
The new figure would double the Gates Foundation’s spending, according to the publication. Since its founding back in 2000 by Gates and his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, the organization has gifted over $100 billion to a variety of charities, especially those that fall under the health, global development, and education umbrellas.
“There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people. That is why I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned,” Gates said in a statement. “I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world.”
Over its final 20 years, the Gates Foundation will focus on ending preventable childbirth deaths, eradicate deadly infectious diseases, and lifting people out of poverty, among its other goals, the foundation’s statement said. The organization has helped to save 82 million lives through its efforts to fight against AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis across the world, as well as increasing access to vaccines in low-income nations.
Other UHNW individuals have pledged to donate their wealth, too. Jeff Bezos said he will give away much of his (at the time) $124 billion net worth in 2022. Warren Buffet, who just announced he was stepping down as the CEO of Berkshire, donated $1.1 billion in the company’s shares to four charitable organizations MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’s ex-wife, has been giving away her fortune at a rapid clip. Since 2020, She has donated $19.3 billion to over 2,450 charities since she began the endeavor. Austrian heiress Marlene Engelhorn took it one step further: She tapped a group of her country’s residents to decide how her $27 million fortune would be spent. That’s certainly one way to do it.
