On a morning in September, Jennifer Gates Nassar, 29, arrives at a Manhattan photo studio at 9:30—the 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: “She would always arrive early if she could.” When Jennifer was taken to school as a child, her mother adds, she liked to get there just after the teachers.
“I’ve gotten better with time!” says Jenn, now a pediatric resident at Manhattan’s 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—this 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’s skin. “I was obsessed with her,” Phoebe says of her big sister.
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—the only woman in her hiring class). She’d sometimes travel ahead of him—quick vacations to Hawaii with Jenn before the other children came along. When he would join a few days later, “the difference in how we were treated was just night and day,” Melinda says.
So the family set up certain systems. Until middle school, the girls used Melinda’s 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’s 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. “I had been around a lot of kids from wealth in college,” says Melinda, who was raised in Dallas by an aerospace-engineer father and a homemaker mother, “and 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.”
According to Forbes, Bill Gates’s current wealth is around $105 billion and Melinda’s is around $29 billion. The house outside Seattle in which the children were raised is reportedly some 66,000 square feet—nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 by the press—and included a trampoline room, six kitchens, 24 bathrooms, and a library with a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript. And yet, despite all of this, the Gateses have become exemplars for a kind of quaint-seeming, Andrew Carnegie–esque 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: “People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them,” he wrote. Melinda has expressed similar principles for years, regularly offering the maxim “To whom much is given, much is expected.” “My mom had a less poetic version of that quote,” Jenn tells me. “She’d say, ‘We’re not people who sit around and eat bonbons.’ What she meant was, if you’re lucky enough to have a lot, you can choose to do nothing or you can choose to make a contribution.”
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—that 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 in 2022, Phoebe, who is now the cofounder of a fashion shopping app called Phia—an amalgam of her name and that of her cofounder and former college roommate, Sophia Kianni—and the cohost with Kianni of a podcast called The Burnouts, took a special interest in reproductive rights. “We know that when a woman has choice, that’s the most scalable form of philanthropy,” she says. “You give a woman access to birth control, access to abortion, she can do anything with her life.” 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’s health. “You can’t believe that you are in the US,” she tells me now. “I got to talk to people who would actually be with women as they’re walking into clinics, and people are protesting outside; they’re throwing things.” 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—and they’re planning another installment of the series in 2026. “Phoebe brings this incredible energy that really galvanizes everyone around her,” Kloss says of working with her. “She’s brilliant. Constantly asking the right questions.”
Jenn and Melinda made their own trip this year to Louisiana, using up the last days of Jenn’s maternity leave. “The purpose was really just to learn firsthand from legislators, from providers, and from patients,” 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. “This is all part of this belief,” Melinda adds deliberately, as if to allow an unspoken urgency to fill the gaps between her words, “that women should have much better access to health care.”
Indeed, days before we meet, Melinda has announced a $100 million 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’s Health Co-Lab run by Iconiq Impact, the philanthropy platform of investment firm Iconiq. It will disperse, initially, $70 million 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. “We’re in a situation now where not only are we regressing in some areas of women’s health and rights, but the funding just isn’t there,” says Navellou. “Of 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…. It makes a huge difference.”
Another thing that comes across, sitting with these women, is that no matter your resources or background, no matter if you are giving away millions or raising money for the PTA, parenting is a profound and humbling leveler. Melinda writes in her memoir from earlier this year, The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, of leaving a Seattle hospital with newborn Jenn, and in those first days at home, experiencing an earthquake. “I realized I would have died for her that night,” she writes. “Here was undeniable evidence that, at the center of my heaving chest, pulsing from my hammering heart, was a force that hadn’t existed there before: a maternal love so primal and ferocious it was almost violent.” (Melinda is a reader as well as a writer, says her book editor Will Schwalbe. When they met in New York for sandwiches and iced tea in the unglamorous downstairs restaurant in the publisher’s building, he asked her what she was reading. He remembers she pulled two books—The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo and a novel by Ann Patchett—from her bag.)
For Melinda, parenting meant stepping away from her career at Microsoft. She wanted to be as “present for them as my mother was for me,” she writes in her memoir. Even when her work for what was then called the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation (launched in 2000) began to dominate her attention, she set parameters. She wouldn’t conduct work calls when her kids were in the car, for instance—a rule she adhered to until one day she had to drive Phoebe and Rory across town to pick up a (second) puppy, and there was a discussion about personnel management that couldn’t wait. But overhearing her mother was a revelation, Phoebe says: “I remember you talking about building the right team and finding the right people. I remember being so young, but being able to soak up some of those lessons.” Phoebe’s start-up Phia has raised $8 million in seed funding from investors like Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner, and Sheryl Sandberg, among others. “I’m so grateful that I had an example of a mom who was out there in the world doing good and working,” adds Jenn. “I hope that my girls also see that I’m working and enjoying what I’m doing outside of them.”
Jenn and Phoebe, who both went to Stanford, have now settled in New York and, between them, have “created our own little ecosystem,” says Jenn, who is married to professional equestrian Nayel Nassar. For Phoebe, New York also makes sense for her career: “I doubt I’ll ever leave,” she says. Melinda is back and forth from Seattle for visits. “And if you write that she lives in New York, she might have to move here,” jokes Jenn, a gentle acknowledgment that, however much they might guard their privacy, there will always be significant interest in how the Gateses spend their time.
Working and living in the same city has made the daughters closer than ever. And being a grandmother has also returned Melinda to the early, joyful days of parenting, though without the perfectionism she once held herself to. “When we’re with the granddaughters, we’re just on the floor. We’re literally on the floor,” she says. “When I see her around Jenn’s daughters, she’s willing to lean into play and chaos,” says Phoebe.
I had anticipated, prior to the interview, that Melinda and her daughters would not be eager to speak about Melinda’s divorce from Bill, which was announced in 2021. But I wanted to bring up a part of Melinda’s memoir that describes how difficult it was for her to tell her parents about this change. “I didn’t really care what the news coverage would be like or what the headlines would say, but the thought of telling my very Catholic parents was horrible,” she writes. Was there a time, I asked Melinda, when her daughters had to tell her something difficult?
She pauses, asks to think about it, and then comes back to the question several minutes later. “There were some hard years,” she says, “between work or what was going on personally in my life—they were like, ‘Mom, you seem really anxious.’ Sometimes we’re anxious and we don’t see that in ourselves, but to have someone you love, someone close to you say it. You go, ‘Oh, I need to look at this.’ ”
“I was going to say something different,” Phoebe chimes in. “For some reason you always used to wear long sleeves and you were so insecure about showing your legs or your arms. I was like, ‘Mom, this is actually a negative for me. You look amazing.’ ”
“That is true,” Melinda laughs. “You did give me that feedback.”
“You used to wear those horrible skorts,” Phoebe says. “I was like, ‘Take the skort off!’ ”
“You see, I get a lot of honesty,” Melinda says.
There is a trust between these three women that lets them speak honestly to one another—about skorts and parenting, but also about the issues that are setting women back, and the attention needed to prevent further regression. As for what’s next, Phoebe is focused on her start-up and Jenn is head-down in her residency, making sure her patients know that when she is with them, they have her full attention—much like Melinda behaves with her grandchildren. After all, there is work to be done, and you never quite know where it will begin.
In this story: For Melinda: hair, Reece Walker; makeup, Kindra Mann. For Phoebe and Jennifer: hair, Blake Erik; makeup, Dmitry Kukushkin; manicurist, Eri Handa; tailor, Carol Ai for Carol Ai Studio.
Produced by Modem Creative Projects.
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