Microsoft co-founder and shareholder; Gates Foundation chair
Microsoft co-founder and shareholder · Person · United States
Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and never fully left it: he stepped off the board in March 2020 but stayed on as "Technology Advisor" to Satya Nadella. Forbes valued him at $104B in March 2023 and $114.2B on 3 October 2026, a $10.2B gain during the years Microsoft's cloud served Israel's army. A 2025 Guardian, +972 and Local Call investigation found that Unit 8200 stored mass intercepts of Palestinian calls on Azure. Three unit sources said the system helped guide deadly air strikes. AP found that Israel's military bought OpenAI models through Azure. Forbes puts his own Microsoft stake below 1%. His foundation's trust sold its last Microsoft shares, worth $3.2B, in early 2026 and now holds about $31B in stocks such as Canadian National Railway and Waste Management. He saw the pandemic coming, and so did his money. In a 2015 TED talk he warned that a virus, "rather than a war", could kill over 10 million people. In 2019 his foundation put $55M into BioNTech and held about one million of its shares by late 2021.
● confirmed by a primary document · ○ reported
Bill Gates stepped down from the company's Board of Directors to dedicate more time to his philanthropic priorities ... He will continue to serve as Technology Advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and other leaders in the company.
$114.2B ... his Microsoft stake is now less than 1%, Forbes estimates ... Gates, who's donated more than $63.9 billion to the Gates Foundation, announced in 2025 that the foundation will shut down in 20 years
Israel's elite cyber-intelligence unit stored vast volumes of intercepted Palestinian phone calls on Microsoft's cloud servers ... Three sources from Unit 8200 said that the cloud-based system helped guide deadly air strikes and shaped operations across the occupied Palestinian territories.
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