On Wednesday, the Microsoft cofounder did his annual Ask Me Anything session on Reddit, where he answers a handful of questions posed by Reddit users on a variety of subjects.
One Reddit user asked him, Isn’t it contradictory to be a humanitarian and then accumulate most scarce resource-land under one?
The user was referring to Gates’ purchases of farmland. Gates owns approximately 275,000 acres of farmland in the US, according to the 2022 edition of the Land Report 100, which tracks the biggest landowners in the country. There were 895.3 million acres of farmland in the US in 2021, according to a February 2022 report from the Department of Agriculture.
Responding to the question, Gates said, “Everything I own will be sold as money moves into the Foundation. In the meantime my investment group tries to invest in productive assets including farmland although that is less than 4% of the total.”
In his response, Gates was referring to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic foundation he established in 2000 with his then-wife, Melinda French Gates. The now-divorced couple continues to run the foundation together; it focuses on tackling issues like poverty, inequity, and infectious diseases.
Gates created the Giving Pledge in 2010 alongside his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett, Gates’ close friend and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The pledge asks the world’s richest people to commit to give away most of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetimes or in their wills.
In July, Gates said he planned to give “virtually all” of his wealth to his philanthropic foundation, acknowledging the move will ultimately lead to him falling off of the list of the world’s richest people. Gates is currently the sixth-richest person in the world with a net worth of $111 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
