Bill Gates charity trust’s holdings in fossil fuel firms rise despite divestment claims

The Gates Foundation Trust holds hundreds of millions of dollars in fossil fuel extractors despite Bill Gates’ claims of divestment made in 2019.End-of-year filings reveal that in 2024 the trust invested $254m in companies that extract fossil fuels such as Chevron, BP and Shell. This was a nine-year record and up 21% from 2016, Guardian analysis found. Adjusting for inflation, it was the highest amount since 2019.Bill Gates, the tech billionaire and founder of Microsoft, was ranked by Forbes as the world’s wealthiest man for most of the years between 1995 and 2017. In 2000, he and his then wife, Melinda, set up the Gates Foundation, which is now the third largest charitable foundation in the world. It uses its resources for a range of causes including public health, poverty reduction, education and climate adaptation.Divestment first became an issue for Gates in 2015. At the time, a global campaign by religious figures, climate activists, students and other charities called for large foundations to divest from fossil fuels.In March 2015 The Guardian launched a campaign called Keep It in the Ground, which called for the Wellcome Trust and the Gates Foundation Trust to “delegitimise the business models of companies that are using investors’ money to search for yet more coal, oil and gas that can’t safely be burned”.Graph showing Gates Foundation investment in fossil fuel companies over the past decadeIn the years leading up to the campaign, the trust was heavily invested in fossil fuels, to the tune of $1.4bn in 2013. “I understood why The Guardian had singled out our foundation and me. I also admired the activists’ passion,” Gates later wrote in his 2021 book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. But he was sceptical of divestment and did not see how “divesting alone would stop climate change or help people in poor countries”.Despite this, the trust shifted its position and sold a great deal of its fossil fuel stocks and bonds, including most of its $187m stock holding in BP and a $824m holding in ExxonMobil. Its holdings in fossil fuel extractors reduced from $1.4bn in 2013 to $260m in 2015, Guardian analysis found.In a 2015 paper, Gates called for more government investment in carbon-free energy sources, arguing that it was not right to “simply let the market guide [investment]” because it searched for shorter-term, guaranteed wins, namely fossil fuel companies.But since 2015, the value of the trust’s investments in several fossil fuel companies has increased. Its Glencore holdings increased from $5.7m in 2015 to $14.1m in 2024, its BP holdings increased from $8.7m to $24.2m, and its Occidental Petroleum holdings rose from $23,529 to $7.9m, among others.Some of this growth can be accounted for by an increase in stock price rather than active investment.In his 2021 book on climate, Gates looked back at 2019 and said he felt a personal, rather than financial, desire not to own stocks in fossil fuel companies. “I don’t want to profit if their stock prices go up because we don’t develop zero-carbon alternatives,” he wrote. “I’d feel bad if I benefited from a delay in getting to zero. So in 2019 I divested all my direct holdings in oil and gas companies, as did the trust that manages the Gates Foundation’s endowment.”By the end of 2020 the trust’s investments in those companies had fallen to $133m. But in the following years the direction of travel reversed, with new investment in producers such as Inpex, which benefited from a $139m holding in 2024, a sevenfold increase from $20m in 2020.Other than Inpex, the trust has millions invested in BP and Equinor, which both faced shareholder rebellions in 2025 due to allegations of greenwashing. Millions more are invested in Occidental Petroleum, which bragged about captured carbon dioxide only to pump it into oilfields to enhance their output.In 2023, the companies in which the Gates trust had invested were responsible for more emissions collectively than Russia, Japan and Germany combined.And in the most recent year of financial results, which goes to the end of 2024, the trust reached a 10-year record, at the same time as Gates’ most recent public statements supported a “strategic pivot” away from focusing on cutting emissions and towards preventing poverty and suffering.The Gates Foundation was approached for comment.The Guardian analysis used publicly available 990-PF forms provided by the Gates Foundation and only included direct fossil fuel extractors, excluding millions of dollars invested in companies that provide drilling equipment, technological services, or own pipelines and refineries.This is a strict definition of “upstream” fossil fuel producers, which also excludes large conglomerates that own subsidiaries that extract, such as Centrica plc or Alfa SAB de CV, whose primary business is not fossil fuel extraction.We also excluded mutual funds that themselves hold investments in fossil fuel companies, though we included financing arms specifically devoted to raising capital for extractors, such as Shell Finance or Petrobras Global Finance.