Bill Gates has said his children will inherit less than 1% of his wealth when he dies, and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates appears to be following a similar approach when it comes to helping their children build careers. In a 2025 interview, French Gates revealed that she deliberately stayed out of her daughter Phoebe Gates’ startup fundraising, even though she could have easily opened doors through her vast network. Instead, she watched from the sidelines as her daughter tried to raise money from investors. “She got capitalized not because of my contacts, not because of me. I wouldn’t put money into it,” French Gates said. Her reason was simple: if the startup was a real business, she wanted other investors to believe in it too.
Why Melinda French Gates did not fund her daughter’s startup
French Gates discussed the decision at the Power of Women’s Sports Summit last year, where she explained why she chose not to invest in her daughter’s company.“She got capitalized not because of my contacts, not because of me. I wouldn’t put money into it,” she said.French Gates said she wanted her daughter to experience the fundraising process herself, including the possibility of being rejected by investors.“If this is a real business,” she said, others should be willing to back it. “That’s what I told her,” French Gates added. “She’s growing from this.”
Bill Gates said his children will inherit less than 1%
Melinda French Gates’ approach echoes a decision Bill Gates has spoken about in the past. The Microsoft cofounder has said his children will receive less than 1% of his fortune after his death. Gates has argued that giving children an extremely large inheritance would not necessarily be helpful and that they should make their own way.French Gates’ decision not to invest directly in her daughter’s company follows a similar principle. Rather than using her own wealth or contacts to help secure funding, she wanted her daughter to build the company independently.
Bill Gates daughter Phoebe launched Phia shopping app
Bill Gates’ youngest daughter Phoebe Gates, has launched a fashion-tech startup called Phia with her Stanford roommate, Sophia Kianni. Phia is a platform that compares clothing prices across more than 40,000 websites, allowing shoppers to search for deals.In April 2025, Phoebe Gates, who was then 22, said her parents had not allowed her to leave Stanford to build a startup, despite her father having taken a different path when he launched Microsoft.The startup has since attracted attention, including recent scrutiny over claims about sales attributed to the platform.
Melinda French Gates says rejection can help female founders
For French Gates, the decision was also connected to the challenges faced by women building companies. “It is very, very hard to get your business funded if you’re a woman,” she said. “And so you do have to learn a bit how to have the courage to play the game and to stick with it.”French Gates said resilience is a common quality among successful women featured on her YouTube series, Moments That Make Us.“I saw that going through something difficult changed all of them, and that they had to learn to find resilience somewhere,” she said. “And in finding that resilience, they found themselves.”
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