Bill Gates is trimming his real-estate footprint around his famed Xanadu 2.0 estate outside of Seattle, even as renewed scrutiny of his past ties to Jeffrey Epstein coincides with a quieter public profile and a rare no‑show at a major AI summit.
Property records show Gates has listed for sale a $4.8 million, four‑bedroom home in Medina, Wash., that sits directly beside his primary 66,000‑square‑foot Xanadu 2.0 mansion on Lake Washington. The 2,800‑square‑foot house, purchased for about $1 million in 1995 via an LLC shortly after his marriage to Melinda French Gates, is one of several smaller properties that form a privacy buffer around the main estate. Over three decades, Gates has amassed much of the wooded hillside, turning the area into a heavily fortified enclave anchored by a residence last appraised at roughly $132 million in 2025.
Gates bought the Xanadu land in 1988 for around $2 million and poured about $63 million into a seven‑year build that produced one of the world’s most recognizable tech mogul compounds, complete with multiple garages, a trampoline room, an indoor pool, a private theater, and extensive digital displays. French Gates told Fortune in 2008 the project was “a bachelor’s dream and a bride’s nightmare” and considered not moving in, underscoring how closely the property has been associated with Gates’ personal tastes and outsized ambitions.
A reversal on downsizing
The listing marks a notable shift from Gates’ own insistence just a year ago that he had no intention of shrinking his residential footprint. In 2025, he told the London Times that, unlike his siblings, he could not imagine downsizing from the “gigantic” Seattle home, saying he liked the houses he owned and that his children still enjoyed coming back. Real‑estate analysts now see the sale as a modest first step in unwinding the layers of property that protect Xanadu 2.0, more pruning of the hedges than a wholesale exit from Medina, but striking given how central the compound has been to his image.
Beyond Washington, Gates controls nearly $300 million in residential real estate, including a $43 million oceanfront mansion in Del Mar, Calif., an $18 million equestrian ranch in Rancho Santa Fe, a golf retreat in Indian Wells, and horse‑country properties around Wellington, Fla. The decision to sell one of the Medina buffer homes therefore barely dents his balance sheet, but it does signal a new willingness to unspool parts of an empire he once described as non‑negotiable.
Epstein files and a potential retreat
The real‑estate move comes as millions of pages of investigative files related to Epstein have reignited questions about Gates’ past meetings with the disgraced financier.
Gates has acknowledged meeting Epstein several times between 2011 and 2013, saying he was seeking funding for global health initiatives and later calling those meetings a “serious error in judgment” that he regrets “every minute.”
French Gates has publicly said his association with Epstein was one factor in their 2021 divorce and described Epstein as “abhorrent” and “evil personified” after meeting him once. The latest document release has pushed those past interactions back into the spotlight, just as Gates appears to be stepping away from highly visible stages.
On Thursday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation confirmed Gates would no longer deliver the keynote address at the high‑profile India AI Impact Summit, a reversal framed as an effort to keep the focus on the event’s agenda but widely read as a response to the renewed Epstein furor. A senior foundation official will appear in his place, as spokespeople reiterate that the new files show Epstein’s attempts to leverage Gates’ name rather than evidence of wrongdoing by the billionaire.
The Gates Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
