Gates, Wife Give $3.3 Billion to His 2 Family Foundations

Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, gave $3.34 billion to his two family foundations last week to increase their endowments to support education, health and the Pacific Northwest, a foundation official said Friday night.

The Gates gift is more than triple the size of the $1-billion gift announced by cable television pioneer Ted Turner in 1997 to support the United Nations but is less than the $5 billion transferred to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 1998, under the terms of a Packard will.

Patty Stonesifer, president of Gates Learning Foundation, said Gates transferred 19.5 million shares of Microsoft stock to the foundations as part of his long-term plan to regularly increase the size of their endowments.

“Bill and Melinda have said for many years that they intend to turn over all their wealth to charity,” she said.

She said the timing of the gift had nothing to do with the Microsoft antitrust trial underway in federal court here.

“If it had anything to do with the antitrust case, we would have told someone,” Stonesifer said.

The learning foundation, which recently changed its name from the Gates Library Foundation, received $1.1 billion, and the William H. Gates Foundation got $2.23 billion.

The learning foundation was established to provide computer and Internet access to public libraries. About $250 million has been spent to help 1,300 libraries, Stonesifer said.

Gates’ Microsoft holdings are worth about $82 billion.