MELINDA FRENCH GATES BELIEVES THE LIGHT WILL WIN

MELINDA FRENCH GATES, at 60, is setting her own agenda: Four years after her divorce from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, she is dedicating her resources to improving the lives of women and girls in the U.S. through her company, Pivotal Ventures. With her then husband, French Gates cofounded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, and spent over two decades traveling globally to understand the world’s biggest health challenges and how best to utilize a multibillion-dollar fortune to address them. She stepped away from her role at the foundation in 2024, and it was later renamed the Gates Foundation. Fortune spoke with French Gates about what has been achieved in the foundation’s first 25 years, her hopes for the future, and her views on the foundation’s ambitious plan to spend $200 billion over the next 20 years, then close down. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

- BY ALEXA MIKHAIL

Fortune: Twenty-five years ago, an article you read propelled the mission of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Now we're here to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the world’s largest private philanthropic organization. What is it like to think back on those early days?

Melinda French Gates: The article that caught our attention was about children dying of diarrhea. I kept thinking, in our own country, when a child has that, you go down to the pharmacy, and you pick something up over the counter. I was aghast to think that children in this day and age were dying of diarrhea.

To think how far we've come in the foundation's 25 years is kind of, in a weird way, almost daunting, even though I was there for every single piece of it. We started with two employees over a pizza parlor in Redmond, Washington. Literally, you'd smell pizza cooking below.

The Gates Foundation has announced that over the next 20 years, it will commit $200 billion to global health, and it will spend the last dollar by Dec. 31, 2045. What's your reaction to this news?

That’s been the plan, that the vast majority of those resources were to go back to society. I think it is fantastic that there's now a public pledge to do that.

I'd be remiss not to ask about some of the threats that are facing global health policy today. The new U.S. administration moved immediately to dismantle USAID. What was your reaction to this?