{"id":706926,"date":"2025-11-18T17:44:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T14:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=706926"},"modified":"2025-11-18T17:44:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T14:44:10","slug":"melinda-french-gates-and-her-daughters-give-their-first-ever-joint-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=706926","title":{"rendered":"Melinda French Gates and Her Daughters Give Their First-Ever Joint Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Magazine<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Melinda French Gates and Her Daughters Give Their First-Ever Joint Interview<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Chloe Schama<\/span><\/span><\/span>Photographer <\/span>Taryn Simon<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

November 18, 2025<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Jennifer<\/span><\/div>\n
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Jennifer Gates Nassar, a pediatric resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.<\/p>\n

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\"Her<\/span><\/div>\n
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Her mother, the philanthropist Melinda French Gates.<\/p>\n

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\"Jennifers<\/span><\/div>\n
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Jennifer\u2019s sister, the entrepreneur and podcast host Phoebe Gates. Sittings Editor: Max Ortega.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span>Portraits by Taryn Simon. Vogue<\/em>, December 2025.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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On a morning in September, Jennifer Gates Nassar, 29, arrives at a Manhattan photo studio at 9:30\u2014the first one here, before the photography crew even, for a shoot that will take place later that day with her younger sister, Phoebe, 23, and mother, the philanthropist Melinda French Gates. This is typical, Phoebe tells me later: \u201cShe would always arrive early if she could.\u201d When Jennifer was taken to school as a child, her mother adds, she liked to get there just after the teachers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve gotten better with time!\u201d says Jenn, now a pediatric resident at Manhattan\u2019s Mount Sinai hospital. Jenn was the kind of oldest child who made PowerPoint presentations to convince her parents that the family deserved a dog. Together with Phoebe and their middle sibling, brother Rory (now an analyst in Washington, DC, where he generally keeps a lower profile), the Gates kids grew up outside Seattle, in what, from certain angles, resembled a normal family\u2014this despite the fact that their father, Bill Gates, ran the biggest software company in the world. Jenn played the role of second mother; Phoebe tracked mud inside, left the house with her hair a mess, and told little white lies about how late she was allowed to stay out to get under Jenn\u2019s skin. \u201cI\u00a0was obsessed with her,\u201d Phoebe says of her big sister.<\/p>\n

Attention swirled around the family, and Melinda thought carefully about how to insulate her children from it. By the time she married Bill, in 1994, he was already well known as the founder of Microsoft (where she herself had worked since 1987\u2014the only woman in her hiring class). She\u2019d sometimes travel ahead of him\u2014quick vacations to Hawaii with Jenn before the other children came along. When he would join a few days later, \u201cthe difference in how we were treated was just night and day,\u201d Melinda says.<\/p>\n

So the family set up certain systems. Until middle school, the girls used Melinda\u2019s maiden name; Bill was not allowed to drop them off for the first two or three weeks of a new school year, and the TV was quickly turned off if he came on the news. At one point, a preschool teacher of Jenn\u2019s took Melinda aside and gently suggested that she fill her daughter in on who her father was, because her classmates were starting to take matters into their own hands. \u201cI had been around a lot of kids from wealth in college,\u201d says Melinda, who was raised in Dallas by an aerospace-engineer father and a homemaker mother, \u201cand I knew how I did not want my children to turn out. I really thought about some of the middle-class values I grew up with.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\"Melinda<\/span><\/div>\n
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Melinda with her daughter Jenn in 1998.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Courtesy of Gates Archive<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

According to Forbes<\/em>,<\/em> Bill Gates\u2019s current wealth is around $105\u00a0billion and Melinda\u2019s is around $29\u00a0billion. The house outside Seattle in which the children were raised is reportedly some 66,000 square feet\u2014nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 by the press\u2014and included a trampoline room, six kitchens, 24 bathrooms, and a library with a Leo\u00adnardo da Vinci manuscript. And yet, despite all of this, the Gateses have become exemplars for a kind of quaint-seeming, Andrew Carnegie\u2013esque model of wealth, intent on returning their extraordinary resources to society. Bill wrote in an announcement earlier this year that he would be accelerating an earlier pledge to disband his wealth, giving almost all of it away by 2045: \u201cPeople will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that \u2018he died rich\u2019 will not be one of them,\u201d he wrote. Melinda has expressed similar principles for years, regularly offering the maxim \u201cTo whom much is given, much is expected.\u201d \u201cMy mom had a less poetic version of that quote,\u201d Jenn tells me. \u201cShe\u2019d say, \u2018We\u2019re not people who sit around and eat bonbons.\u2019 What she meant was, if you\u2019re lucky enough to have a lot, you can choose to do nothing or you can choose to make a contribution.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Sitting in front of this trio, so quick to tease, so eager to entertain one another, it does seem as if something went right while they were growing up\u2014that the effort the parents exerted to keep their eyes open and their feet on the ground in their public lives had consequences in their private ones. After the fall of Roe<\/em> in 2022, Phoebe, who is now the cofounder of a fashion shopping app called Phia\u2014an amalgam of her name and that of her cofounder and former college roommate, Sophia Kianni\u2014and the cohost with Kianni of a podcast called The Burnouts<\/em>,<\/em> took a special interest in reproductive rights. \u201cWe know that when a woman has choice, that\u2019s the most scalable form of philanthropy,\u201d she says. \u201cYou give a woman access to birth control, access to abortion, she can do anything with her life.\u201d After conversations with her mother, Phoebe took it upon herself to plan a trip to Louisiana and Mississippi, states with near-total abortion bans, to see the effects on women\u2019s health. \u201cYou can\u2019t believe that you are in the US,\u201d she tells me now. \u201cI got to talk to people who would actually be with women as they\u2019re walking into clinics, and people are protesting outside; they\u2019re throwing things.\u201d Before the election last year, she produced a video documentary series with her friend Karlie Kloss about the impact of the increasing restrictions on reproductive rights\u2014and they\u2019re planning another installment of the series in 2026. \u201cPhoebe brings this incredible energy that really galvanizes everyone around her,\u201d Kloss says of working with her. \u201cShe\u2019s brilliant. Constantly asking the right questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"Melinda<\/span><\/div>\n
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Melinda Gates with her daughter Phoebe in 2003.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Photo: Courtesy of Gates Archive<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Jenn and Melinda made their own trip this year to Louisiana, using up the last days of Jenn\u2019s maternity leave. \u201cThe purpose was really just to learn firsthand from legislators, from providers, and from patients,\u201d Jenn says. They spoke to women who were looking for basic care, mothers who had lost their babies, providers whose patients relied primarily on Medicare, and med-school educators. \u201cThis is all part of this belief,\u201d Melinda adds deliberately, as if to allow an unspoken urgency to fill the gaps between her words, \u201cthat women should have much better access to health care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, days before we meet, Melinda has announced a $100\u00a0million investment through Pivotal, the philanthropic endeavor she launched in 2015, and the global health nonprofit Wellcome Leap. The funds will support research into diseases and disorders that disproportionately affect women (80 percent of patients with autoimmune disorders are women, for example). Another recent effort involves her daughters: The three Gates women are founding donors of the Women\u2019s Health Co-Lab run by Iconiq Impact, the philanthropy platform of investment firm Iconiq. It will disperse, initially, $70\u00a0million to organizations focused on maternal health, sexual and reproductive health, and gender-based violence (the intent is to invest $100 million total). According to Matti Navellou, the head of Iconiq Impact, conversations with Phoebe were critical to getting the project off the ground. \u201cWe\u2019re in a situation now where not only are we regressing in some areas of women\u2019s health and rights, but the funding just isn\u2019t there,\u201d says Navellou. \u201cOf course, it helps when you have a recognized name with the credibility of the Gates family, for example, to bring folks out of the sidelines\u2026. It makes a huge difference.\u201d<\/p>\n