The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said it plans to add additional trustees to its governing board by early next year, and that Melinda French Gates will resign from the panel in two years if she and her former partner find they can’t work together.

The foundation’s Chief Executive Officer Mark Suzman and Connie Collingsworth, the operating and legal chief, will lead the search and develop recommendations for the number of trustees and the selection process, according to a statement Wednesday. New additions will be announced in January 2022.

The soon-to-be divorced couple will also commit a fresh US$15 billion to the organization, according to the statement. That money will go to the foundation’s endowment, which stood at roughly US$50 billion before the announcement and has given away about as much over the past two decades.

“These new resources and the evolution of the foundation’s governance will sustain this ambitious mission and vital work for years to come,” Bill Gates said.

French Gates added she remains fully committed as co-chair to the foundation. These “governance changes bring more diverse perspectives and experience to the foundation’s leadership.” she said.

Still, if either decides they cannot continue to work together as co-chairs, French Gates will resign. In that scenario, French Gates “would receive personal resources from Gates for her philanthropic work” that would be completely separate from the foundation’s endowment.

 

Rocky Times

It’s been a rocky couple of months since Gates and French Gates announced their divorce in May after 27 years of marriage, including reports detailing rumors of infidelity and long-simmering tensions between the two.

The announcement is a dramatic change from when, immediately following their divorce announcement, Gates and French Gates, as well as a foundation spokesperson, insisted there would be no changes to the organization.

It may be the first time the foundation is adding members to the board of trustees who aren’t in the Gates family or a fellow billionaire friend. At the time the couple announced their divorce, there were only three trustees -- themselves and Warren Buffett, who said he was stepping down last month.

While Suzman is CEO, it’s ultimately the trustees who set the course for philanthropic foundations. The divorce announcement sparked a conversation in the philanthropic world about the small size of the Gates Foundation’s board and that it was made up only of its living donors, who can have an outsize role in determining where their money goes. That’s not always for the best, critics argue.

“The idea that rich people know best about social welfare is just ludicrous,” said Linsey McGoey, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex and author of a book about the Gates Foundation, “No Such Thing as a Free Gift.”

 

Power Struggles

French Gates has played a large role in the foundation over the years, even as Gates himself played a lesser role while he was still running Microsoft Corp. There have been power struggles between the two in the past, which French Gates details in her book “The Moment of Lift.”

“The first time Bill and I sat down to write our Annual Letter together, I thought we were going to kill each other,” she wrote in the book, published in 2019. “We both got angry.”

French Gates has largely been focused on gender equality over the better part of the last decade and has started her own philanthropy operation in 2015 -- Pivotal Ventures, which is an investment and incubation firm that largely works on gender equality. Since it was started, Pivotal has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in more than 150 organizations to-date, according to a spokesperson.

The divorce raised questions over whether as an individual philanthropist, French Gates might focus more of her time -- and money -- on Pivotal. The US$2.1 billion commitment from the foundation to advance gender equality in June seemed to cement her ties to the entity, though.

“The world has been fighting for gender equality for decades, but progress has been slow,” French Gates said in a statement about the foundations commitment . “Now is the chance to reignite a movement and deliver real change.”

Since the divorce was announced, French Gates has received stock worth more than US$3 billion from the Gates’s Cascade Investment, the entity that manages the duo’s combined fortune. At the time, it stood at $145 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.