Melinda French Gates doesn’t want to raise 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 the brush-off from her rich mom, who walked away from her 2021 divorce with an estimated $25 billion settlement.
“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.
The recent Stanford graduates also launched a podcast in April called “The Burnouts” on “Call Her Daddy” founder Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network, tracking their early entrepreneurial experiences.
“A really critical piece of marketing is this founder-led growth and pulling back the curtain on what it’s like to be a founder and to learn,” Phoebe told The Post at the time.
The daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates previously interned at British Vogue and has spoken publicly on reproductive rights at several events.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
