Wednesday, July 9, 2025 - Melinda French Gates has revealed efforts she's making to avoid raising a nepo baby.
The ex-wife of Bill Gates and longtime philanthropist, with
a net worth of $31 billion, said she refused to fund her daughter’s
startup.
“I have a daughter who just started a business this year,”
said French Gates, 60, during a recent talk with tennis legend Billie Jean King
during the Power of Women’s Sports Summit.
“She got capitalized, not because of my contacts, not
because of me. I wouldn’t put money into it.”
The mom did not name the daughter, but Phoebe Gates, the
youngest of her three children with the Microsoft founder, recently launched an
AI-powered fashion app called Phia with her Stanford roommate, Sophia
Kianni.
The platform compares clothing prices across 40,000 sites to
help users find the best deals.
“It is very, very hard to get your business funded if you’re
a woman,” French Gates said. “And so you do have to learn a bit how to have the
courage to play the game and to stick with it.”
French Gates has long invested in women’s rights
philanthropy, previously serving as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation for nearly 25 years.
However, she said it’s important that her daughter learns
how to fund her startup the hard way.
If this is a “real business,” French Gates said, then others
need to be willing to back it, and if not, her daughter will learn to handle
rejection.
“That’s what I told her. She’s growing from this,” she added.
Phoebe, 22, didn’t seem to mind getting no financial support
from her mum.
“We don’t want this to be something that’s funded by my
family – we want this to be a real company,” Phoebe, 22, told The Post
earlier this year.
“That’s really important for us … while I have a ton of
privilege coming from my family, it’s about having a product that stands on its
own.”
It’s not the first time the family made it clear that they want their children to carve a name for themselves.
Bill Gates has previously said their three children – daughter Jennifer, 30, son Rory, 25, and Phoebe – would inherit “less than 1%” of his fortune after his death.
While French Gates refused to contribute to Phia, and the
company’s funding remains private, Kris Jenner has publicly said she’s backing
the platform.
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