Bill Gates plans to spend more than $200 billion over the next 20 years to fight poverty, malnutrition, polio and other global scourges, accelerating by decades a commitment to give away nearly all of his wealth.
The 69-year-old Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said he would give 99% of his fortune to his charitable foundation, which he chairs, sooner than originally planned because the world faces many urgent problems and he wants to fund—and encourage others to fund—new tools to solve them.
This is an opportunity to say “philanthropy really can change the world,” Gates said in an interview. Over the Gates Foundation’s 25 years , “we’ve been able to have huge impact and so, hopefully, that inspires people both in global health and in other areas.”
The foundation said it would double its spending over the next two decades and close its doors at the end of 2045 after disbursing the billions. The foundation’s charter previously called for it to close 20 years after Gates’s death.
Gates said he expects the total to be more than $200 billion, including his wealth and the foundation’s current endowment, which was $77.2 billion at the end of 2024. It also includes contributions from Warren Buffett during his lifetime.
That will still leave Gates and his family with plenty of money. Even after a quarter-century of philanthropy, he is still one of the world’s richest men, with a net worth of about $108 billion, according to the Forbes 2025 world’s billionaires list. “I’ll still be comfortable,” he said. And the rest of his family will also be OK.
Gates’s move comes at a critical point for public health. Childhood deaths have been reduced by more than half over the past few decades, HIV has become a treatable disease, and millions of people have emerged from poverty.
But the U.S. and other wealthy governments have recently slashed billions of dollars in global aid and research funding, putting gains against HIV , malaria and other diseases at risk. It also complicates Gates’s philanthropy because his foundation pursues its goals in partnership with governments and other funders.
Gates said he isn’t stepping up his giving to fill in gaps left by governments. “I’m not being more generous because others are being less generous,” he said.
A push to eradicate polio will fail if the U.S. government doesn’t help fund it, Gates said. His foundation has invested $6.2 billion in the effort. “Without the U.S. involvement and resources, it isn’t going to succeed,” he said.
Progress against childhood mortality could reverse, Gates said. “Instead of childhood deaths going down from five million to four million over the next four years, unless we’re able to reverse a lot of these cuts, it will go back up to six million, and going backwards on that is crazy,” he said.
The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, targeted by fellow billionaire and Trump administration adviser Elon Musk , could lead to a new wave of deaths and is “way beyond any elimination of waste,” Gates said in an onstage interview at an event Thursday celebrating the foundation’s 25th anniversary.
“When it comes to knowledge of USAID, as brilliant as Elon is, I actually know more about it than he does,” Gates said. Musk’s characterization of USAID as a criminal enterprise “was not based on having much data,” he said.
“These are heroic people, probably other than the military, the most heroic people who work for the U.S. government and the work they do makes a huge difference,” Gates told the audience.
Gates said he would advocate for the U.S. to spend money that is currently budgeted by Congress for global health causes, and he urged spending to continue. The philanthropist said he last spoke with President Trump in February.
Gates said he hoped that innovation will help the foundation and others do more with less. “AI will play a dramatic role in improving what we’re able to do even with very stringent financial constraints,” he said in the earlier interview.
Gates has evolved from a tech executive focused heavily on tech-y global health solutions such as new vaccines to a philanthropist who said one of his biggest goals over the next 20 years is to solve malnutrition. The condition figures into half of deaths of children under age 5, and stunts brain and body development in those who survive, he said. Studying malnutrition and finding ways to combat it are “just super exciting,” he said.
Among his goals also is a gene therapy that would be a functional cure for HIV and affordable for poorer countries.
The Gates Foundation has disbursed $101.56 billion since 2000 from Gates and his former wife, Melinda French Gates , as well as Buffett to develop new vaccines for meningitis and malaria, a new treatment for drug-resistant tuberculosis, and tools to improve women’s health. Gates and French Gates co-chaired the foundation until last year when she left to concentrate on her own philanthropic goals .
Gates said he hopes other billionaires step up and donate more of their wealth, and that others will follow after his money is gone.
“At that point, there’ll be lots of rich people who will be young and up-to-date about how to build an organization and what AI has done and what politics has done, and what part of the equity agenda remains incomplete,” he said.
Write to Betsy McKay at betsy.mckay@wsj.com
