Melinda Gates Has a Strict Rule With Her Closest Friends

For the past 30 years, Melinda Gates has had a strict walking date with three of her best friends penciled into Monday mornings. She told Marie Claire in an interview for the brand’s 2025 Changemakers Issue that she leans on her friends for advice and guidance. 

“If you’re in town, you’re there,” she says. “I call them my truth council, because we consult each other about almost every major decision in our lives. That word truth is key. I have to be willing to tell them the truth about what I’m thinking and feeling. And then I know that they’ll tell me the truth, even if it’s a hard one I won’t want to hear.” 

These relationships were particularly important in May 2024, when Gates decided to distance herself from the Gates Foundation to centralize her own philanthropy through Pivotal Ventures. Her foundation, which she created in 2015, seeks to advance women’s rights and influence throughout the world.

She said as she continued witnessing women’s rights diminish, she felt she could make a larger impact away from the foundation, whose scope doesn’t perfectly align with the cause.

“I am simply not willing to accept that my granddaughters could grow up with less freedom than I did,” Gates says. “I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to get more power in women’s and girls’ hands.”

It’s been nearly a year and a half since she left the Gates Foundation. In May 2024, she pledged $1 billion in support of women in the U.S. The money will be distributed to organizations via the foundation through 2026. 

Gates says she’s always been one to plan her next step, but while she’s still currently in a transition period, she’s learned not to rush the moments in between chapters. 

“If you’re always going from one thing to the next according to a preconceived plan, you never look up, look around, and see the world from a different perspective,” she says. “Transitions force you to pause. And if you linger in that wide-open space between chapters and pay attention, they have a lot to teach you.”