GIVE AND LET GIVE

MELINDA FRENCH GATES is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.

- KEZIAH WEIR

DALLAS, 1982. A young woman with ample ambition gave a prophetic valediction to her graduating class at Ursuline Academy. “If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember, also, that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.”

There’s something to be said for beginning with an ending—closed door, open window, as they say. The first time I meet this young woman, now the philanthropist Melinda French Gates, in a studio high above Manhattan’s financial district, she’s barreling toward the end of her fifth decade. She’s also three years out from her divorce from Bill Gates amid a pandemic in which their foundation became the controversial global face of COVID response and vaccine development. The second time we speak, a few months later, she has announced her departure from the foundation so that she might funnel her time (and $12.5 billion) into improving the welfare of women and families—the mission of her company, Pivotal Ventures. It may be a new era of valediction for French Gates, but she still evokes a high-achieving student departing her hometown with the sense that the best is yet to come.

Is it too on the nose to note that French Gates requests as the soundtrack to her shoot (and suggested by her daughter Phoebe) the triumphant breakup anthems of The Tortured Poets Department? Or that the day before, when she was photographed with a glittering Van Cleef & Arpels band on her left ring finger, tabloid headlines blared news of an engagement—but that it turns out she’s not even dating that guy anymore, and furthermore, she tells me, the ring was actually a gift from herself, to herself? That when I start to ask her when she made the purchase, she answers breezily, “I think I bought it three years ago”?