By Ebenezer Mabinuola
Bill Gates has started the clock on his own fortune – and it’s ticking toward zero.
At 69, the tech pioneer-turned-philanthropist is preparing for what he calls his “last big project”: to give away nearly all of his immense wealth and close the doors on the Gates Foundation forever, all by the year 2045.
Not with a quiet exit. Not with a legacy preserved in perpetuity. But with urgency.
“I don’t want my obituary to list net worth,” Gates wrote in a deeply personal letter published this week. “If people say anything about me when I’m gone, I hope it’s that I used what I had to make the world a little less unfair.”
The plan is staggering in scope. Over the next 20 years, Gates will channel $200 billion into efforts to reduce preventable deaths, combat infectious disease, and lift millions out of extreme poverty. And then, he’ll walk away. The foundation he built with Melinda French Gates – a giant in the world of global giving – will close on New Year’s Eve, 2045.
This was not always the plan. When the foundation was born in 2000, the idea was to endure long after its founders were gone. But Gates says the moment calls for something different. A faster, sharper, more mortal kind of philanthropy.
“The world doesn’t need another eternal institution,” he wrote. “It needs solutions that arrive while people are still waiting for them.”
He’s not leaving his family in the lurch. About 1% of his wealth – still over a billion dollars – will go to his children. But from an early age, they were told not to expect dynastic fortunes. Gates never believed in hoarding opportunity.
The decision is both philosophical and intensely personal. He credits industrialist Andrew Carnegie’s stark warning -“The man who dies rich dies disgraced” – as an early seed. Warren Buffett, his longtime friend and partner in giving, helped shape the final form. But this final act belongs to Gates alone.
It comes at a time of retreat in public generosity. Wealthy nations are trimming foreign aid budgets. Programs that once brought vaccines, clean water, or antiretrovirals to millions are being wound down. Gates is blunt about the cost.
“There are children who will die if we get this wrong. That’s not melodrama. That’s math.”
He is not afraid to speak plainly about his critics either. In an unguarded moment, he took a swipe at Elon Musk – now a U.S. government official – for slashing foreign aid programs and “gutting global lifelines.” He called it a betrayal of the responsibility that comes with power.
Still, Gates knows his own house is not immune to scrutiny. His foundation has drawn fire over the years for wielding outsize influence in global health and education.
“We’ve made mistakes,” he said. “But we’ve also saved lives – millions of them. We’re not perfect. We are trying.”
The final phase of the foundation will focus on three goals: keeping mothers and children alive, wiping out deadly but preventable diseases, and offering real economic mobility to the poorest people on Earth. Twenty years. That’s the deadline.
He’s even sketched out a hand-drawn timeline showing his personal fortune sliding downward -toward near-zero – alongside the countdown to the foundation’s closure. The image, like the message, is simple: No golden tombstone. No dynasty. Just impact.
In his final remarks, Gates threw down a gauntlet to his peers.
“Someone out there should beat me at this,” he wrote. “Give more. Save more. Care more. That would be the best kind of legacy.”
And then, with typical understatement, he signed off:
“Time to get to work.”
