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Sarah Jackson, Lakshmi Varanasi, Sindhu Sundar, and Samantha Delouya
2023-04-10T15:41:05Z
- Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft, has a net worth of $110 billion.
- His three children with Melinda French Gates, his ex-wife, have mostly undertaken academic pursuits.
- He became a grandfather in March, when his eldest daughter gave birth to her first child.
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The beats of Bill Gates' lore are familiar and quintessential to 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, he's one of the richest and most famous men on Earth.
Gates, who Forbes estimates is worth about $110 billion, stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020. He's cultivated his brand of philanthropy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, his endeavor with Melinda French Gates, now his ex-wife.
Their three children, Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe, have largely avoided the spotlight and now seem mostly engaged in academic pursuits.
An equally important part of Gates' story is his own illustrious heritage.
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Gates grew up in a well-to-do and well-connected family, surrounded by the rarefied personal and professional milieu of his parents, whose 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 parents' professional lives even influenced his social calendar — the 2019 Netflix documentary "Inside Bill's Brain" describes Gates accompanying his father, William Gates Sr., a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle, to American Bar Association meetings.
The elder Gates, the president of the Washington State Bar Association, became a name partner at the firm K&L Gates; a statement in 2020 about his death says it was formed when a firm he'd helped form merged with another.
Bill Gates' 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's enlisting of Microsoft to provide an operating system in the 1980s.
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"She was very big in the social scene in the Seattle area," Bill Gates said of his mother in "Inside Bill's Brain."
Discussions about "nepo babies," a term enshrined in the popular lexicon thanks to a New York magazine story about who achieves success in Hollywood, can be controversial. But beneficiaries of the financial stability and connections often acknowledge their own good fortune.
Gates has reportedly said he plans to leave each of his three children $10 million — a fraction of his fortune.
"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 "Inside Bill's Brain."
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"And I've had so much luck in terms of all these opportunities," he said.
Meet Gates' own lucky children below.
Gates and his children did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
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Jennifer Gates
Jennifer Gates, 26, is the oldest of the Gates children.
Like their father, Jennifer Gates and her siblings 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.)
Jennifer Gates, a decorated equestrian, started riding horses when she was 6. 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 in Wellington, Florida, to build an equestrian facility.
Gates 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. Her LinkedIn indicates she graduated from Stanford in 2018 and began pursuing a medical degree at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine in New York in 2019.
In January 2020, she announced she was engaged to the Egyptian equestrian Nayel Nassar. They married in October 2021 and announced in November 2022 that they were expecting. They welcomed their first child in March 2023, soon after couple reportedly bought a $51 million New York City penthousethat has six bedrooms and a plunge pool.
In April, Bill and Melinda French Gates shared their first photos with their grandchild on Instagram.
"I can't wait to watch you discover the world," Gates captioned his photo.
"There is nothing quite like holding your first grandchild. It seems like just yesterday I was holding Jenn at this age. Now she has a baby of her own—and I am bursting with pride watching her and Nayel step into their new role as parents," French Gates said in her photo caption.
In a 2020 interview with the equestrian lifestyle publication Sidelines, Gates spoke about growing up wealthy.
"I was born into a huge situation of privilege," she said, adding, "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."
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Rory John Gates
Rory John Gates is the only son of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. A 2017 Instagram post from his mother suggests he's 23.
In the post, French Gates described her son as "a feminist" who "inherited his parents' obsessive love of puzzles."
Unlike his family, however, Rory Gates leads a pretty offline life. He maintains a private Facebook page, and it's unclear whether he has profiles on Instagram or LinkedIn.
From the information available online, Gates appears to be the product of an elite education. Like his father and siblings, he attended Lakeside School, a private day school in Seattle.
He went on to attend the University of Chicago, where he appears to have participated in a moot-court competition in 2018, based on a photo posted on Facebook by the university's moot-court team.
In 2018, Gates' parents appeared to purchase a 3,000-square-foot five-bedroom house in a neighborhood near the university for $1.25 million, the Chicago Tribune reported. The report said that Christopher Carletti, an attorney who often represents the Gates family, was listed on the deed as the trustee for the trust that purchased the home, and that the three-story property was three houses from the university's campus.
Gates appears to have graduated from the University of Chicago in 2022, based on photos his sister Jennifer Gates posted on Facebook. "Celebrating Rory's graduation from the University of Chicago this weekend!" the caption said, adding: "A double major & masters in 4 years. So proud of you."
It's not entirely clear what he's been up to in the months since he graduated.
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Phoebe Gates
Phoebe Gates, 20, is the youngest of the Gates children. An Instagram post from Jennifer Gates suggests she graduated from high school in June 2021 and is following in her older sister's footsteps by studying at Stanford University.
Unlike her parents, who both studied computer science in college, Phoebe Gates seems to be pursuing a career in the fashion industry. She interned at British Vogue and has posted TikToks about being at shows at fashion weeks in Copenhagen, New York, and Paris over the past year.
On social media she often highlights the importance of sustainability in fashion, posting about vintage and secondhand stores and celebrating designers who don't use real leather and fur.
While she's strayed from the family business, Gates shares with her parents a passion for social-justice causes. She attended the UN General Assembly with her mother last fall and recently spent three weeks in Rwanda with Partners in Health, a nonprofit that has partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Like her mother, she often publicly discusses issues of gender equality. She recently wrote an op-ed article for Teen Vogue about the importance of femtech, which encompasses products, services, and technologies that specifically address women's health.
Gates even posted a TikTok of herself dressing up as her mother for Halloween last year.
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