SEATTLE — For roughly an hour at the Paramount Theatre, Melinda French Gates was the queen of Seattle.
The sellout crowd on Thursday night was primed for French Gates and her interviewer, the actor and burgeoning media mogul Reese Witherspoon. The late-April sun shone on attendees walking to the theater giddy to hear from both.
At 60, French Gates told the audience she wishes she could be a private person. She craves silence and calm. Yet she’s accustomed to a crowd and, increasingly, the spotlight.
Celebrity first fell on French Gates when she was in her early 20s and dating a man well on his way to becoming the world’s richest person, Bill Gates. Her name rose to prominence fast, paired with his as one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But four years after their divorce, she’s happy in her distinct public persona. To reward herself for sticking through a multicity book tour promoting “The Next Day,” her new collection of reflections, she’s taking a silent retreat.
“I actually can’t imagine that,” Witherspoon said with the ghost of a smile, the audience erupting in laughter. “I like to talk. It’s how I chart my day, talking to my mom and girlfriends.”
French Gates’ appeal — to the Seattle crowd, to the readers, to Witherspoon — is the work she’s done with the fortune Microsoft made, and the uncommon life she’s led.
As she talked through the life transitions examined in the book — the loss of a friend, leaving her career behind, parenthood, divorce — the nodding crowd followed along, murmuring approval and quite often breaking into robust applause and laughter.
French Gates started a strategic shift in her philanthropy 10 years ago, eventually making a $2 billion bet that a more nimble, more focused giving organization can better match the needs of a rapidly changing world and counter a rising tide of gender-based discrimination. At the same time, she decided to put herself — and her deeply personal, totally common struggles — forward.
Speaking with The Seattle Times, French Gates reflected on that appeal.
“Anybody who’s lucky enough to make it to 60, you’ve been through a lot of transitions in life,” she said. “I thought maybe there are some words of wisdom that I’ve been able to glean from friends, and sharing this might be helpful to others.”
Accepting the messy
French Gates has always wanted to have all the answers. Growing up, she was a perfectionist, always overprepared and overeager to achieve the next goal.
In “The Next Day,” she describes a meeting early on in her philanthropic career with an unnamed government official, a woman she had always admired. French Gates spent weeks preparing, memorizing briefing documents and internally role-playing the meeting. She lugged around a 3-inch-thick binder for weeks, ready for anything.
“She showed up with a notecard and a few bullet points,” French Gates told The Times, laughing at the memory. “It just blew my mind.”
Looking back, it was one of the moments French Gates realized she didn’t have to be perfect to belong. Not every meeting, she realized, was a referendum on her worth.
In the memoir, French Gates brings that hindsight to pivotal moments in her life, or “clearings,” as she calls them. The time after a life-changing event where she can decide the next step, like when she became a parent.
“I had this notion in my head about being the perfect parent, and that’s just a myth,” she told The Times. “There is no such thing.”
To take the pressure down, she asked herself if she was a good-enough parent. It worked. In her memoir, French Gates applied that lens to the other transitions.
“The divorce. It’s messy,” she said. “My friends would see me sometimes not at my best self, but I had to have enough trust and vulnerability in those relationships to let myself be messy. I’ve learned through that process that being parts of your messy self is OK.”
The divorce also represented a part of her life that didn’t go according to plan. She writes that she had never imagined she would end a marriage. Her three siblings were all in “stable, happy marriages,” and her parents have been married for 63 years.
But after taking the reader through the events leading up to it, and the apprehension behind letting the world know, she calls it one of the most important things she’d ever done.
And despite initial trepidation about including the divorce in her book, she decided to be completely honest. Hard as it was, the breakup taught her to lean on friends, listen to herself and take a break in the “clearing” before charting a new course.
“I felt like I grew a lot through it, and I found that there was a lot of resilience when I came through on the other side,” she told The Times. “Unfortunately, a lot of Americans go through divorce so I thought, well there are some things I learned in the process that may be helpful to others.”
A “pivotal” $2 billion
Seattle’s Gates Foundation launched as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 and eventually grew into one of the world’s largest charitable foundations. Its goals were extraordinary: reduce poverty, expand health care and eliminate child mortality.
In her memoir, French Gates says she thought the foundation would be the center of her life’s work, after spending 25 years baking her values into it. But since she’s in her season of transition, she says she’s embracing letting that go.
“We have a good board there, we have a foundation CEO who I’ve known for 17 years, it’s in good hands,” she told The Times. “It afforded me the opportunity to strike out on my own.”
For about a decade, French Gates split her time between the Gates Foundation and Pivotal Ventures, the giving organization she began in 2015. While she still believed in the work the Gates Foundation was doing, in “The Next Day” she writes that “after a difficult few years of watching women’s rights rolled back … I realized it was time to move forward into the next chapter of my philanthropy.”
So in 2024, nine years after founding Pivotal Ventures, French Gates turned her full attention to the organization.
French Gates told The Times that the ramifications, for the U.S. and the world, of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade were front of mind.
“I was in so many low- and middle-income countries, and I saw how they looked to the United States for women’s health care and well-being policies we did or didn’t have,” she said. “I thought, you cannot have things being rolled back in the United States.”
Through Pivotal Ventures alone, French Gates has committed $2 billion since 2019 for people and organizations working on women-focused causes.
Half of that commitment was announced after she left the Gates Foundation and will run through 2026. It’s split between grants for organizations working to advance social and workforce progress for women and funding for charities.
At Pivotal Ventures, French Gates wants to be more responsive to a rapidly changing world.
As the world has seen, a change in leadership in the U.S. can shift the strategy of her work overnight. Pivotal Ventures has homed in on paid family medical leave, a benefit that isn’t available to most American workers. Some states have adopted laws allowing workers to take time off for the birth of a child or for a medical condition.
French Gates said the organization has been doing state-level work on paid family medical leave for over seven years now and pointed to 13 states, including Washington, that now have it. Under Washington’s law, eligible workers receive 12 weeks of paid time off after a birth or a serious medical condition for the worker or in the worker’s family.
“We can build on that, and when there’s an opening at the federal level, we’ll go back and try,” she said. “It’s about being flexible in how you work and where you do your grant making.”
The Gates Foundation measures its progress over years, setting ambitious goals far out into the future and moving steadily toward them. Under Pivotal Ventures, French Gates thinks her philanthropic work can move faster than that.
She and Bill Gates issued a public letter in 2018 as part of the Giving Pledge, a movement by billionaires to commit to redistributing the massive fortunes they had accumulated. They aimed to give away the majority of their wealth, with education and health care access as top priorities.
French Gates’ wealth has exploded despite her intent to jettison it. Forbes’ wealth history shows her net worth grew from $11.1 billion in 2024 to $30.4 billion this year.
She wrote another public letter in 2022 committing to giving away most of her wealth and her time, energy and efforts to Pivotal Ventures’ mission. But she added that she believed philanthropy is most effective when it prioritizes flexibility over ideology.
“It’s much easier to imagine that you have all the answers when you’re sitting in a conference room in Seattle than when you’re face-to-face with a business owner in Nairobi or an Indigenous activist in New Mexico,” she wrote in that letter.
Helping, her way
Though it may have been Witherspoon interviewing French Gates on Thursday, to the more than 2,800 audience members — roughly 1,000 more than the attendance at Bill Gates’ book event in February — it seemed like a conversation between two friends.
They traded advice, passed questions back and forth and congratulated each other for their work in empowering women — French Gates for Pivotal Ventures, Witherspoon for her women-focused media company, Hello Sunshine.
Speaking with The Times, French Gates said she hopes Pivotal will eventually do enough good to render itself obsolete. It would be yet another transition for her.
“I’m not trying to create an institution with Pivotal that will last in perpetuity,” she said. “It’s much more that I want the work to be long-lasting, which is getting women and girls equality in society.”
