Bill Gates on Capital Allocation

Gates founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 as an umbrella for organizations accelerating innovation in sustainable energy and other emissions-cutting technologies. At the November 2015 United Nations climate conference in Paris he announced a coalition of twenty-eight wealthy investors from ten countries, alongside a complementary initiative, Mission Innovation, in which twenty national governments pledged to double spending on carbon-free energy research. In December 2016 the effort crystallized into a one-billion-dollar Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, backed by investors collectively worth $170 billion, including Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Ray Dalio, Jack Ma, Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, and Meg Whitman. The fund's discipline is patience: it targets businesses where failure risk is high and the investment horizon runs twenty years, against the five-year norm of traditional venture capital. Gates, who had already committed a personal two billion dollars, argued that existing renewables like wind and solar were advancing but the scale of the challenge demanded exploring many paths.

TerraPower, the Bellevue-based nuclear reactor company Gates co-founded and chairs, began with a traveling-wave reactor design and a 2015 agreement with China National Nuclear Corporation to build a 600-megawatt prototype at Xiapu in Fujian province, with commercial plants planned for the late 2020s; the project was abandoned in January 2019 when the Trump administration restricted the necessary technology transfers. The company then won a October 2020 Department of Energy award, between $400 million and $4 billion over five to seven years, under the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program for its sodium-cooled Natrium design. In June 2021 TerraPower and PacifiCorp, a Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary, announced plans for a joint reactor, and on November 16, 2021, Kemmerer, Wyoming, was selected from four coal-reliant candidate towns. The 345-megawatt project, estimated at four billion dollars with the department covering half and Gates contributing a billion, broke ground in June 2024 and received its construction permit in March 2026, the first ever granted for a non-light-water reactor.

In June 2006, Warren Buffett pledged roughly ten million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares, then valued at $3,071 each before a later fifty-to-one split, to be delivered over multiple years, with the first 500,000-share tranche worth about $1.5 billion. The gift came with three conditions: Bill or Melinda Gates must remain alive and active in the foundation's administration, the foundation must continue to qualify as a charity, and each year it must give away the previous year's Berkshire contribution plus an additional five percent of net assets, effectively converting the donation into a matching grant that doubled giving rather than swelling the endowment. The foundation received five percent of the earmarked shares in 2006 and declining installments each July thereafter, with Buffett adding another two billion dollars of stock in 2018. His cumulative giving to the foundation reached roughly $48 billion before the partnership ended in 2026.

When Microsoft went public in 1986, Gates retained 44.9 percent of the company, and the following year Forbes listed him as a billionaire with $1.25 billion, the youngest self-made billionaire in the world at thirty-one. He held the top spot on the Forbes 400 from 1993 through 2007 and again later, and Jeff Bezos finally displaced him as the world's richest person in October 2017, with Gates briefly regaining the position in November 2019 after a surge in Microsoft shares. He has described himself as having paid more tax than any individual, over six billion dollars, gladly, and advocates higher taxes particularly for the wealthy. His fortune also funded an unusual collector's streak, including the Codex Leicester, Leonardo da Vinci's scientific writings, bought at auction in 1994 for $30.8 million, and a Medina estate nicknamed Xanadu 2.0. He has since announced his intention to give away virtually all of his fortune over time and move off the world's-richest lists.

Gates's public image has swung across eras: from the hard-driving executive once caricatured as a tyrannical technocrat, he was remade in the 2000s into a celebrated techno-philanthropist, magazine-cover material whose opinions on global health and climate carried weight. The 2021 announcement of his divorce from Melinda French Gates brought a harsher turn, as coverage surfaced romantic pursuits of women who worked for him, a long-term extramarital affair, and a friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and his handling of pandemic-era controversies deepened the shift. His investment vehicle Cascade Investment made him the largest private owner of farmland in the United States, with roughly 242,000 acres across nineteen states, the single largest shareholder of Canadian National Railway, and a 16 percent holder of AutoNation. He flew commercial coach class on business trips until 1997, the year he finally bought his first private jet.

In 2025 Gates made two decisions that define his philanthropy's endgame: he will donate virtually all of his remaining wealth, about $200 billion, over the following two decades, and the foundation will close its doors at the end of 2045. In his own telling of the story, he understood from the beginning that the foundation would not be permanent, because philanthropy works best when it is time-limited and aimed squarely at the needs that matter most. The final chapter concentrates the institution on three goals: no mother, child, or baby dying of a preventable cause, a generation growing up without deadly infectious diseases, and hundreds of millions of people escaping poverty. Across its first twenty-five years the foundation invested more than $102.3 billion in global health and development, American education, and economic mobility, with teams and partners in over 140 countries, and child mortality has been cut in half since 2000.