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Gates foundation quits Microsoft completely, offloads final $3.2bn stake
A decades-long financial marriage ends as the charity shifts into spending overdrive
Seattle: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has cut its final thread with Microsoft. In the first quarter of 2026, the foundation’s trust quietly disposed of its remaining 7.7m shares in the software giant, a stake worth roughly $3.2bn (Rs 26,500 crore), according to regulatory filings. The sale draws a definitive line under a relationship that had, for decades, formed the financial backbone of the world’s largest private charitable organisation.
The exit was not abrupt. The trust held some 28.5m Microsoft shares as recently as two years ago, and the unravelling was methodical until it wasn’t. In the third quarter of 2025, the trust dumped nearly 65 per cent of its remaining position in a single quarter. The final tranche followed in early 2026. Microsoft, a company that Gates co-founded with Paul Allen in 1975, had long been more than a line item. At its peak in 2022, it accounted for 27 per cent of the foundation’s entire portfolio. That level of concentration in a single stock, however blue-chip, was always a vulnerability waiting to be addressed.
The foundation’s holdings were built partly on Gates’s own share donations and partly on the steady flow of Berkshire Hathaway stock gifted by Warren Buffett, much of which was converted into diversified assets over time. With the Microsoft position now fully liquidated, the trust’s investment portfolio stands at an estimated $31.7bn (Rs 2.63 lakh crore).
The strategic logic is straightforward, if audacious. Gates announced last year that the foundation intends to spend down its entire endowment by 2045, abandoning the model of the traditional perpetual charitable trust in favour of deploying capital at scale while the problems it targets remain urgent. This year alone, the foundation expects to distribute around $9bn (Rs 74,700 crore) in grants.
Holding 27 per cent of your portfolio in one stock makes little sense when you are, in effect, running a $9bn-a-year spending machine with a hard deadline. The Microsoft exit is not sentiment; it is arithmetic.
