Melinda French Gates has transformed her relatively young Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation into one of America’s largest private foundations almost overnight, in part due to her split with ex-husband Bill Gates.
As part of the pair’s high-profile divorce announced in 2021, Gates agreed to make a $7.88 billion donation—one of the largest ever—to French Gates’ private foundation, according to a tax filing, as previously reported by the New York Times’ DealBook.
Gates’ donation skyrocketed Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation’s assets by more than 1,000% to about $7.4 billion in 2024, according to a tax filing. That’s up from $604 million at the end of 2023.
French Gates’ Pivotal Philanthropies now finds itself in the ranks of philanthropy power players, just over a year after Gates and French Gates separated their philanthropic efforts in May 2024. Among those power players is Mackenzie Scott, who donated $7.2 billion to various organizations in 2025 alone. Scott has donated $26 billion since 2020, just after her divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The multibillion-dollar Gates donation to Pivotal is part of a previously promised $12.5 billion that French Gates said would be disbursed thanks to her “agreement with Bill.” These funds have been fully paid out, and Gates’ donation makes up part of the money, a spokesperson for Pivotal Philanthropies confirmed to Fortune.
After resigning in May 2024 as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now the Gates Foundation, French Gates said the $12.5 billion would be used “on behalf of women and families.” French Gates, who has a net worth of $17.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index previously told Fortune billionaires like herself “owe something back to society.“
It’s unclear where the additional $4.6 billion was allocated. The funds could have been given to French Gates’ LLC, Pivotal, which does not file a tax return, according to DealBook.
Founded in 2022, Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation, which aims to “accelerate the pace of social progress for women and young people” operates within a group of organizations that also includes Pivotal Initiatives Fund for policy and advocacy work as well as Pivotal Ventures, which focuses on direct investments and partnerships, according to Pivotal’s website. While Pivotal Philanthropies is bound by strict 501(c)(3) rules governing minimum payouts, self-dealing restrictions, and detailed reporting requirements, as an LLC, Pivotal Ventures operations aren’t subject to strict reporting, giving it more freedom, flexibility, and anonymity than a nonprofit.
One organization that has already benefited from Pivotal Philanthropies’ previous donations is Durham-based nonprofit Rewriting the Code, which supports young women working in or looking to enter tech careers. The organization, now in its 10th year, according to founder Sue Harnett, received $5 million from Pivotal Philanthropies in 2025.
Thanks in part to the funding from Pivotal, Harnett has grown her organization from one employee in 2019 to 26 as of this year. In 2026, the company is looking to focus on helping computer science students and women early in their tech career get trained for a world where AI is ubiquitous.
The funding from Pivotal has been instrumental to continuing these programs, and importantly, keeping them free for the women who need them, said Harnett.
“It’s transformative,” Harnett told Fortune. “It has allowed us to serve thousands more women than we ever could. It’s allowed us to build up a staff that has a variety of talents that we really need to be able to serve the women of our membership as well as we possibly can.”
