For nearly two decades starting in 1990, Bill Gates ranked as either the richest or second richest person on the annual Forbes 400 list of America’s wealthiest people.
Not anymore. Though Gates still has a massive fortune of $107 billion, his rank on the new Forbes list has fallen to No. 9 this year, down from No. 6 a year ago. His net worth is also $4 billion less than a year ago–after a year when U.S. stock indices like the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 rocketed up by 30%. Among all billionaires globally, Gates now ranks No. 12–the first time he’s fallen out of the world’s top ten richest people since 1991.
A big reason for the drop: his 2021 divorce from Melinda French Gates, his wife of 27 years.
When Melinda announced in May that she was resigning as co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the following month, she also mentioned that she’d be getting an additional $12.5 billion for her philanthropic efforts. She didn’t say where the funds were coming from or when she would get them. But Forbes has learned that those funds were not a transfer of Gates Foundation assets. They were coming from Bill. And it appears that he’s made the transfer of these funds already.
In addition, Forbes has nearly tripled our previous estimate of the divorce settlement that Melinda French Gates received. Based on new information about Bill Gates’ current fortune, we’ve boosted French Gates’ net worth to an estimated $29 billion, up from $10.3 billion a year ago. That makes her the ninth-richest woman in the country, just behind casino heiress Miriam Adelson. Spokespeople for both Gates and French Gates declined to comment on the couple’s divorce settlement.
In a wide-ranging discussion at the Forbes 400 Summit on Philanthropy in September 2022, Bill Gates predicted his own decline on the Forbes ranking. Gates said at the time that he planned to keep giving away more of his fortune and continue doing so until he dropped off the Forbes billionaires list. Gates also said there was “a small chance” that the former couple wouldn’t keep working together while adding that the Gates Foundation would continue to operate for another 25 more years.
French Gates has staked her efforts, through her Pivotal Ventures investing and philanthropic arm, on “working to get more power into the hands of more people–especially women,” per its website, which says she’s committed $2 billion to expand women’s power and influence. In 2022 she created the Pivotal Philanthropies foundation and funded it with $674 million in publicly traded securities. In all likelihood, the foundation will land some of the $12.5 billion she has touted as well.
Now that Melinda no longer co-chairs the Gates Foundation, one question that’s come up is whether the foundation will continue her focus on supporting women and families. At a Gates Foundation event about women’s economic empowerment in Manhattan last week, CEO Mark Suzman raised that very question. His answer: “Nothing about our commitment to gender equality is changing,” he said. “We have a deep, sustained focus on women’s economic empowerment.”