• Melinda French Gates is one of the world's richest women, even after her divorce from Bill Gates.
• Bill and Melinda Gates first met at Microsoft, and were married for 27 years.
• Here's what to know about Melinda Gates' life, career, and philanthropic pursuits.

Melinda French Gates, born Melinda Ann French, is 60 years old and one of the richest women — indeed, one of the richest people — alive today.

Though she already enjoyed a successful career before wedding Microsoft founder Bill Gates, her marriage rocketed Melinda Gates through the stratosphere in terms of wealth. But her main legacy is the money she has given away in the form of charitable works through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

Melinda Gates' early life and career

Gates seemed destined for achievement from a young age, starting with an impressive academic career.

Melinda Gates was born in 1964 in Dallas, Texas, and raised alongside three siblings. She developed an early interest in computers and programming and, after graduating from high school at the top of her class, she went on to earn dual degrees in computer science and economics from Duke University.

She then earned an MBA from Duke as well. She completed both undergraduate degrees and her master's in just five years.

The first company for which Melinda Gates ever worked would also be the last corporation of which she was an employee: Microsoft. Gates joined to software juggernaut in 1987 after turning down an offer from the then larger IBM, per the National Women's History Museum.

Gates worked in the growing firm's marketing department and soon was helping to develop and launch software products including Publisher; Cinemania; the vaunted word processing platform still used today, Microsoft Word; and the wildly successful travel site Expedia.

Melinda Ann French would surely have caught the eye of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates based on her success at Microsoft alone, but their meeting, four months after she joined his company, led to more than a working relationship; it led to a budding romance.

Bill and Melinda Gates' early years, marriage, and family

After seven years of dating, Bill and Melinda Gates were married in Hawaii on New Year's Day in the year 1994. It was a private — indeed secretive — ceremony that allegedly cost $1 million, hardly a problem for Bill Gates, who had been a billionaire since 1987.

Melinda Gates left Microsoft in 1996, shortly after the birth of her and Bill Gates' first child, a daughter named Jennifer. The couple had a second child, Rory, in 1999, and a third, Phoebe, who was born in 2002.

It was a few years after her departure from Microsoft that Melinda Gates stepped into a leadership role at a charitable organization that would define much of the next two decades of her life and would change the lives of thousands of people around the world.

Melinda Gates' work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Founded in 1994 as the William H. Gates Foundation and rebranded as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) in the year 2000, after merging with the Gates Library Foundation which Melinda had set up in 1997.

To date the BMGF has given away more than $77 billion in charitable grants.

Melinda Gates served as the co-chair of the foundation for well over two decades, and during her time there the organization, at times billed as the largest private charitable organization on the planet, worked on everything from disease eradication to empowering women to developing clean water and agriculture projects and more.

Melinda French Gates stepped down from her role at the BMGF in the late spring of the year 2024, a bit less than three years after she divorced Bill Gates.

Why and when did Melinda and Bill Gates get divorced?

Melinda Gates and Bill Gates were officially divorced in 2021, ending a 27-year union. There had long been rumors of infidelity on Bill Gates' part, and in interviews, Melinda Gates cited a lack of trust and said she realized the relationship wasn't "healthy."

Melinda Gates also spoke of grieving the relationship, but ultimately making the painful decision that she could not remain married to Bill Gates.

Melinda Gates was also reported to have serious misgivings about Bill Gates' relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and alleged sex trafficker who died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in 2019.

How much money did Melinda Gates get in the divorce?

Bill and Melinda Gates did not have a prenuptial agreement in place, opting for a separation agreement, instead. But Melinda Gates would nonetheless leave the union as a wealthy woman. She was granted more than $6.3 billion worth of Microsoft stocks, and has a total estimated net worth of $30 billion, per Forbes.

Melinda Gates' life post-divorce

Following her split from Bill Gates, Melinda Gates briefly dated a man named Jon Du Pre, a Fox News Host, but the relationship was short-lived.

What has not been short-lived is Melinda Gates' continuing dedication to philanthropy. In 2022, she formed the charitable organization Pivotal Ventures, which is, per the organization's site, dedicated "to accelerat[ing] the pace of social progress … through high-impact investments, philanthropy, partnerships, and advocacy, [it's] working to get more power in the hands of more people—especially women."

In late 2024, Melinda Gates was photographed holding hands with former Microsoft employee Phillip Vaughn, who now heads the craft beer delivery company Tavour.

• Bill Gates, the Microsoft cofounder, shares three kids with his ex-wife Melinda French Gates.
• They include a recent med school graduate and a fashion startup cofounder.
• Here's what we know about the children of one of the world's richest men.

Bill Gates' story is a quintessential example of the American entrepreneurial dream: A brilliant math whiz, Gates was 19 when he dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen in 1975.

 Nearly 50 years later, Gates' net worth of $131 billion makes him one of the richest and most famous men on Earth, per Forbes. He stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020 and has cultivated his brand of philanthropy with the Gates Foundation — a venture he formerly ran with his now ex-wife Melinda French Gates, who resigned in May. 

Even before founding one of the world's most valuable companies, Gates' life was anything but ordinary. He grew up in a well-off and well-connected family, surrounded by his parents' rarefied personal and professional network. Their circle included a Cabinet secretary and a governor of Washington, according to "Hard Drive," the 1992 biography of Gates by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Brock Adams, who went on to become the transportation secretary in the Carter administration, is said to have introduced Gates' parents.)

His father, William Gates Sr., was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle and the president of the Washington State Bar Association.

His mother, Mary Gates, came from a line of successful bankers and sat on the boards of important financial and social institutions, including the nonprofit United Way. It was there, according to her New York Times obituary, that she met the former IBM chairman John Opel — a fateful connection thought to have led to IBM enlisting Microsoft to provide an operating system in the 1980s.

"My parents were well off — my dad did well as a lawyer, took us on great trips, we had a really nice house," Gates said in the 2019 Netflix documentary "Inside Bill's Brain."

"And I've had so much luck in terms of all these opportunities."

Despite his very public life, his three children with French Gates — Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe — largely avoided the spotlight for most of their upbringing. 

Like their father, the three Gates children attended Seattle's elite Lakeside School, a private high school that has been recognized for excellence in STEM subjects — and that received a $40 million donation from Bill Gates in 2005 to build its financial aid fund. (Bill Gates and Paul Allen met at Lakeside and went on to build Microsoft together.)

But as they have become adults, more details have emerged about their interests, professions, and family life. 

While they have chosen different career paths, all three children are active in philanthropy — a space in which they will likely wield immense influence as they grow older. While Gates has reportedly said that he plans to leave each of his three children $10 million — a fraction of his fortune — they may inherit the family foundation, where most of his money will go.

Here's all we know about the Gates children.

Gates and his children did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Jennifer Gates Nassar

Jennifer Gates Nassar, who goes by Jenn, is the oldest of the Gates children at 28 years old.

A decorated equestrian, Gates Nassar started riding horses when she was six. Her father has shelled out millions of dollars to support her passion, including buying a California horse farm for $18 million and acquiring several parcels of land in Wellington, Florida, to build an equestrian facility.

In 2018, Gates Nassar received her undergraduate degree in human biology from Stanford University, where a computer science building was named for her father after he donated $6 million to the project in 1996.

She then attended the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, from which she graduated in May. She will continue at Mt. Sinai for her residency in pediatric research. During medical school, she also completed a Master's in Public Health at Columbia University — perhaps a natural interest given her parents' extensive philanthropic activity in the space.

"Can't believe we've reached this moment, a little girl's childhood aspiration come true," she wrote on Instagram. "It's been a whirlwind of learning, exams, late nights, tears, discipline, and many moments of self-doubt, but the highs certainly outweighed the lows these past 5 years."

In October 2021, she married Egyptian equestrian Nayel Nassar. In February 2023, reports surfaced that they bought a $51 million New York City penthouse with six bedrooms and a plunge pool. The next month, they welcomed their first child, Leila, and in October, Gates Nassar gave birth to their second daughter, Mia.

"I'm over the moon for you, @jenngatesnassar and @nayelnassar—and overjoyed for our whole family," Bill Gates commented on the Instagram post announcing Mia's birth.

In a 2020 interview with the equestrian lifestyle publication Sidelines, Gates Nassar discussed growing up wealthy.

"I was born into a huge situation of privilege," she said. "I think it's about using those opportunities and learning from them to find things that I'm passionate about and hopefully make the world a little bit of a better place."

She recently posted about visiting Kenya, where she learned about childhood health and development in the country.

Rory John Gates

Rory John Gates, who is in his mid-20s, is Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates' only son and the most private of their children. He maintains private social media accounts, and his sisters and parents rarely post photos of him.

His mother did, however, write an essay about him in 2017. Titled "How I Raised a Feminist Son," she describes as a "great son and a great brother" who "inherited his parents' obsessive love of puzzles."

In 2022, he graduated from the University of Chicago, where, based on a photo posted on Facebook, he appears to have been active in moot court. At the time of his graduation, Jennifer Gates Nassar wrote that he had achieved a double major and master's degree.

Little is publicly known about what the middle Gates child has been up to since he graduated, but a Puck report from last year gave some clues, saying that he is seen as a "rich target for Democratic social-climbers, influence-peddlers, and all variety of money chasers." According to OpenSecrets, his most recent public giving was to Nikki Haley last year.

The same report says he works as a congressional analyst while also completing a doctorate.

Phoebe Gates

Phoebe Gates, 22, is the youngest of the Gates children.

After graduating from high school in 2021, she followed her sister to Stanford. She graduated in June after three years with a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology. Her mom, Melinda French-Gates, delivered the university's commencement address.

In a story that Gates wrote for Nylon about her graduation day, she documented her graduation day, including a party she cohosted that featured speeches from her famous parents and a piggyback ride from her boyfriend Arthur Donald — the grandson of Sir Paul McCartney.

She has long shown an interest in fashion, interning at British Vogue and posting on social media from fashion weeks in Copenhagen, New York, and Paris. Sustainability is often a theme of her content, which highlights vintage and secondhand stores and celebrates designers who don't use real leather and fur.

That has culminated in her cofounding Phia, a sustainable fashion tech platform that launched in beta this fall. The site and its browser extension crawl secondhand marketplaces to find specific items in an effort to help shoppers find deals and prevent waste.

Gates shares her parents' passion for public health. She's attended the UN General Assembly with her mother and spent time in Rwanda with Partners in Health, a nonprofit that has received funding from the Gates Foundation.

Like her mother, Gates often publicly discusses issues of gender equality, including in essays for Vogue and Teen Vogue, at philanthropic gatherings, and on social media, where she frequently posts about reproductive rights.

She's given thousands to Democrats and Democratic causes, including to Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Democratic Party of Montana, per data from OpenSecrets. According to Puck, she receives a "giving allowance" that makes it possible for her to cut the checks.

Perhaps the most public of the Gates children — she's got over 450,000 Instagram followers and a partnership with Tiffany & Co. — she's given glimpses into their upbringing, including strict rules around technology. The siblings were not allowed to use their phones before bed, she told Bustle, and to get around the rule, she created a cardboard decoy.

"I thought I could dupe my dad, and it worked, actually, for a couple nights," she told the outlet earlier this year. "And then my mom came home and was like, 'This is literally a piece of cardboard you're plugging in. You're using your phone in your room.' Oh, my gosh, I remember getting in trouble for that."

It hasn't always been easy being Gates's daughter. In the Netflix documentary "What's Next? The Future With Bill Gates," she said she lost friends because of a conspiracy theory suggesting her father used COVID-19 vaccines to implant microchips into recipients.

"I've even had friends cut me off because of these vaccine rumors," she said.