SEATTLE — The final trade was small by the standards of the fortune it closed out. In the first quarter, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust sold its remaining 7.7 million shares of Microsoft stock, worth about $3.2 billion at current prices, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission dated May 16.
The sale marks the end of a relationship that helped define the technology industry. Bill Gates built Microsoft into the world’s most valuable company, made his fortune from its stock, and then, over the past decade, methodically sold that stock off to fund the world’s largest private philanthropy. After the first-quarter sale, the foundation trust no longer holds a single Microsoft share.
The foundation’s money has always moved in careful steps. For years after Gates left day-to-day management of Microsoft in 2008, he kept a large personal stake and the foundation trust held tens of millions of shares. That began to change in 2019, when the trust sold Microsoft stock for the first time, and the selling accelerated after Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board in March 2020.
The timing of the final sale has drawn attention because of where Microsoft’s stock stands. The company has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom, with its cloud business and its investment in OpenAI lifting shares to repeated records. Selling at the top, if that is what the foundation did, would be a shrewd move; selling too early would be a costly one. The trust’s managers are not saying which it was.
The decision to sell appears to be about diversification as much as anything else. The foundation’s endowment, which stood at roughly $75 billion in recent years, is run by Cascade Investment, the money manager Gates set up in the 1990s. Cascade has been steadily shifting the portfolio away from technology and into bonds, real estate, and stakes in companies from railroads to hotels.
The shift makes sense for an institution with the foundation’s obligations. The Gates Foundation is required to pay out at least 5 percent of its assets each year to maintain its tax status, and in practice it has been spending more than that — more than $8 billion a year in grants in recent years, focused on global health, disease eradication, and education. A portfolio built around a single volatile tech stock is a poor match for that kind of steady spending.
“Foundations need liquidity and predictability,” said a philanthropy adviser who has worked with large endowments. “A concentrated position in one company, however successful, is a risk they cannot afford to carry.”
The foundation’s exit from Microsoft does not mean Gates is out of the stock. Gates personally has been selling down his own Microsoft holdings for years, and his personal stake has shrunk to a fraction of what it once was. But his personal investments are managed separately from the foundation’s, and he has said repeatedly that the bulk of his fortune will eventually go to philanthropy.
The sale also closes a chapter for Microsoft, which counted Gates’s foundation among its largest shareholders for three decades. The company has long since ceased to depend on his presence; Gates left the board in 2020, and his successor, Satya Nadella, has taken the company in directions — cloud computing, AI, gaming — that Gates’s generation of leaders never imagined.
Gates’s own view of Microsoft has been pragmatic in public. He has praised Nadella’s leadership and the company’s AI investments, and he has said he remains “involved and engaged” with the company’s technology even as his ownership fades. His attention, by his own account, is on the foundation’s work: malaria, tuberculosis, vaccine distribution, and the disease-eradication campaigns that consume most of its budget.
For investors, the sale is data, not commentary. It tells them that one of the most sophisticated money managers in the world, sitting on one of the best-performing stocks of the past two decades, chose to take the money off the table. Whether that signals anything about Microsoft’s prospects is unknowable; Cascade has been reducing the position for years, and the final sale was a rounding error in a portfolio the size of the foundation’s.
The larger story is the transfer of wealth itself. Gates’s fortune, built on software that ran on millions of personal computers, is now flowing into vaccine refrigerators in rural Africa, mosquito nets in malaria zones, and research labs trying to cure tuberculosis. The last Microsoft shares were a bridge between those two worlds, and on May 16, the bridge was dismantled.
The foundation said in a statement that the sale was part of its routine portfolio management and that it remains focused on its grant-making mission. It did not say whether it would ever buy Microsoft stock again. For now, the answer to the question that used to open every investor presentation about the company — “What does Gates think of the stock?” — is that Gates no longer has an opinion that shows up in a filing.
