• Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates shares three kids with his ex-wife Melinda French Gates.
• His eldest daughter is a med school graduate and his youngest a startup cofounder.
• Here's what we know about the children of one of the world's richest men.

Bill Gates' story is a quintessential example of the American entrepreneurial dream: A brilliant math whiz, Gates was 19 when he dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft with his friend, the late Paul Allen, in 1975.

Nearly 50 years later, Gates' net worth of almost $108 billion makes him one of the richest and most famous men on Earth, per Forbes. He stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020 and has cultivated his brand of philanthropy with the Gates Foundation — a venture he formerly ran with his now ex-wife Melinda French Gates, who resigned in May. 

Even before founding one of the world's most valuable companies, Gates' life was anything but ordinary. He grew up in a well-off and well-connected family, surrounded by his parents' rarefied personal and professional network. Their circle included a Cabinet secretary and a governor of Washington, according to "Hard Drive," the 1992 biography of Gates by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Brock Adams, who went on to become the transportation secretary in the Carter administration, is said to have introduced Gates' parents.)

His father, William Gates Sr., was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle and the president of the Washington State Bar Association.

His mother, Mary Gates, came from a line of successful bankers and sat on the boards of important financial and social institutions, including the nonprofit United Way. It was there, according to her New York Times obituary, that she met the former IBM chairman John Opel — a fateful connection thought to have led to IBM enlisting Microsoft to provide an operating system in the 1980s.

"My parents were well off — my dad did well as a lawyer, took us on great trips, we had a really nice house," Gates said in the 2019 Netflix documentary "Inside Bill's Brain."

"And I've had so much luck in terms of all these opportunities."

Despite his very public life, his three children with French Gates — Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe — have largely avoided the spotlight for most of their upbringing. 

Like their father, the three Gates children attended Seattle's elite Lakeside School, a private high school that has been recognized for excellence in STEM subjects — and that received a $40 million donation from Bill Gates in 2005 to build its financial aid fund. (Bill Gates and Paul Allen met at Lakeside and went on to build Microsoft together.)

As they've gotten older, they've stepped more into the public eye, and more details have emerged about their interests, professions, and family life. 

Gates recently said his children will get "less than 1%" of his fortune when he dies. But they may also inherit the family foundation, where most of his money will go.

Here's all we know about Bill Gates' children.

Gates and his children did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Jennifer Gates Nassar

Jennifer Gates Nassar, who goes by Jenn, is the oldest of the Gates children at 28 years old.

A decorated equestrian, Gates Nassar started riding horses when she was six. Her father has shelled out millions of dollars to support her passion, including buying a California horse farm for $18 million and acquiring several parcels of land in Wellington, Florida, to build an equestrian facility.

In 2018, Gates Nassar received her undergraduate degree in human biology from Stanford University, where a computer science building was named for her father after he donated $6 million to the project in 1996.

She then attended the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, from which she graduated in May. She's continuing at Mt. Sinai for her residency in pediatric research. During medical school, she also completed a Master's in Public Health at Columbia University — perhaps a natural interest given her parents' extensive philanthropic activity in the space.

"Can't believe we've reached this moment, a little girl's childhood aspiration come true," she wrote on Instagram. "It's been a whirlwind of learning, exams, late nights, tears, discipline, and many moments of self-doubt, but the highs certainly outweighed the lows these past 5 years."

In October 2021, she married Egyptian equestrian Nayel Nassar. In February 2023, reports surfaced that they bought a $51 million New York City penthouse with six bedrooms and a plunge pool. The next month, they welcomed their first child, Leila, and in October, Gates Nassar gave birth to their second daughter, Mia.

"I'm over the moon for you, @jenngatesnassar and @nayelnassar—and overjoyed for our whole family," Bill Gates commented on the Instagram post announcing Mia's birth.

In a 2020 interview with the equestrian lifestyle publication Sidelines, Gates Nassar discussed growing up wealthy.

"I was born into a huge situation of privilege," she said. "I think it's about using those opportunities and learning from them to find things that I'm passionate about and hopefully make the world a little bit of a better place."

She recently posted about visiting Kenya, where she learned about childhood health and development in the country.

Rory John Gates

Rory John Gates, who is in his mid-20s, is Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates' only son and the most private of their children. He maintains private social media accounts, and his sisters and parents rarely post photos of him.

His mother did, however, write an essay about him in 2017. Titled "How I Raised a Feminist Son," she describes as a "great son and a great brother" who "inherited his parents' obsessive love of puzzles."

In 2022, he graduated from the University of Chicago, where, based on a photo posted on Facebook, he appears to have been active in moot court. At the time of his graduation, Jennifer Gates Nassar wrote that he had achieved a double major and master's degree.

Little is publicly known about what the middle Gates child has been up to since he graduated, but a Puck report from last year gave some clues, saying that he is seen as a "rich target for Democratic social-climbers, influence-peddlers, and all variety of money chasers."

Phoebe Gates

Phoebe Gates, 22, is the youngest of the Gates children.

After graduating from high school in 2021, she followed her sister to Stanford. She graduated in June after three years with a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology. Her mom, Melinda French Gates, delivered the university's commencement address.

In a story that Gates wrote for Nylon about her graduation, she documented the day, including a party she cohosted that featured speeches from her famous parents and a piggyback ride from her boyfriend Arthur Donald — the grandson of Sir Paul McCartney.

She has long shown an interest in fashion, interning at British Vogue and posting on social media from fashion weeks in Copenhagen, New York, and Paris. Sustainability is often a theme of her content, which highlights vintage and secondhand stores and celebrates designers who don't use real leather and fur.

That has culminated in her cofounding Phia, a sustainable fashion tech platform that launched in beta this fall. The site and its browser extension crawl secondhand marketplaces to find specific items in an effort to help shoppers find deals and prevent waste.

Her father told The New York Times he was glad she didn't ask him to back the startup.

"I thought, 'Oh boy, she's going to come and ask,'" Gates said. "I would have kept her on a short leash and be doing business reviews, which I would have found tricky, and I probably would have been overly nice, but wondered if it was the right thing to do. Luckily, it never happened."

In 2025, Phoebe also launched a podcast called "The Burnouts" with her former roommate and current cofounder Sofia Kianni.

Gates shares her parents' passion for public health. She's attended the UN General Assembly with her mother and spent time in Rwanda with Partners in Health, a nonprofit that has received funding from the Gates Foundation.

Like her mother, Gates often publicly discusses issues of gender equality, including in essays for Vogue and Teen Vogue, at philanthropic gatherings, and on social media, where she frequently posts about reproductive rights.

She's given thousands to Democrats and Democratic causes, including to Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Democratic Party of Montana, per data from OpenSecrets. According to Puck, she receives a "giving allowance" that makes it possible for her to cut the checks.

Perhaps the most public of the Gates children — she's got over 450,000 Instagram followers and a partnership with Tiffany & Co. — she's given glimpses into their upbringing, including strict rules around technology. The siblings were not allowed to use their phones before bed, she told Bustle, and to get around the rule, she created a cardboard decoy.

"I thought I could dupe my dad, and it worked, actually, for a couple nights," she told the outlet earlier this year. "And then my mom came home and was like, 'This is literally a piece of cardboard you're plugging in. You're using your phone in your room.' Oh, my gosh, I remember getting in trouble for that."

It hasn't always been easy being Gates's daughter. In the Netflix documentary "What's Next? The Future With Bill Gates," she said she lost friends because of a conspiracy theory suggesting her father used COVID-19 vaccines to implant microchips into recipients.

"I've even had friends cut me off because of these vaccine rumors," she said.

• Trump's tariffs on China could mean higher prices for wedding dresses.
• Some 90% of wedding gowns are made in China.
• David's Bridal says it's working to shift production outside China to avoid the added costs.

As if planning a wedding wasn't already stressful enough, President Donald Trump's trade war could make it even pricier to say "I do."

The Trump administration has issued a combined 145% tariff on many imports from China, where the vast majority of wedding dresses are produced.

That means the average wedding dress — which retails for about $2,000, according to a survey by The Knot, a wedding planning site — could end up more than twice as expensive if retailers pass the additional costs down to the consumer.

Bridal retailers told Business Insider that the tariffs have been a huge disruption to their industry. The National Bridal Retailers Association, which represents over 6,000 independent brick-and-mortar bridal stores around the United States, said as many as 90% of bridal gowns are produced in China.

"The overriding feeling is despair," Angie Oven, a bridal shop owner and president of the NBRA, told BI after a meeting she held with 75 of the group's members. "There's a little bit of PTSD right now because a lot of us really just recovered from COVID."

Oven, who owns The Bridal Gallery in Salem, Oregon, said shops are working closely with manufacturers to find solutions. The group is also appealing to lawmakers to push for bridal gowns to be added to a tariff exemption list.

"Our No. 1 goal is to be removed from the tariff list," Sandra Gonzalez, vice president of NBRA and owner of Sparkle Bridal Couture in Sacramento, said.

Although Americans often associate China with cheap goods, bridal shop owners said the quality of dresses produced in China at scale is remarkable, from the lace to the boning to the sometimes 10,000 beads handsewn onto the gowns.

"We do not have the infrastructure to produce the quality of goods that brides are demanding of us," Gonzalez said. "To build the factories and train the people, that would take a whole generation."

Price increases and uncertainty

Alicia Adams, owner of Her's Bridal & Special Occasion in Minden, Louisiana, said the price of gowns is already going up. Some manufacturers are raising the wholesale price of gowns by as much as 30%, while others are, at least for now, trying to absorb the cost.

"Now that it's over 100%, obviously those manufacturers and designers aren't able to absorb those costs," she told BI. "They're going to have to pass it down to us, which means we would have to pass it down to our brides."

Adams said some bridal stores might try to absorb the costs, but at the current tariff rate, it likely won't be feasible. Some might instead absorb 50% and then pass the other half on to shoppers.

Complicating the situation is that many bridal gowns are made-to-order, meaning some brides have already picked out and paid for dresses now being produced abroad. When those gowns are delivered, they could be hit with a huge tariff for which the bride or the bridal shop never planned.

Vanessa Gerstner, whose wedding is this September in Italy, told BI she's waiting for a dress she ordered in November to arrive from Australia — where tariffs on imported goods are 10%.

"I'm hoping that I won't get another huge charge on top of what I've already paid, but since it is being shipped directly to me and not a bridal salon, I think, from my understanding, I would have to eat that cost," she said.

She said the additional fee "isn't terrible," especially compared to other brides who are now opting for cheaper dresses than they originally planned due to the increased tariff costs.

Bridal consultant Alina Garza, who works at One Bridal in Annapolis, Maryland, said in a video posted to TikTok last week that dress designers have already reached out to her to say they'll be raising prices by up to 20%. Two are US designers that source fabric from India and China, she later told BI by direct message.

One commenter said she was "not able to sleep over this" and planned to have items from China shipped to Mexico, where she would pick them up. Another said the factory making her dress has paused all shipments.

Shifting production out of China

Trump has said one of his motivations for the tariffs is to encourage more manufacturing in the United States. But while big bridal companies are considering shifting production out of China, they aren't necessarily looking at the United States.

Kelly Cook, CEO of David's Bridal, the largest wedding retailer in the United States, told BI that the company is not "tariff-proof" but "tariff-resilient," in part because it has 36 design and production facilities around the world, including in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Myanmar.

In anticipation of tariffs, the company has been proactively shifting its production out of China over the past few months. Cook said the company has lowered its China-based production from 50% of its total just several months ago to 30% today.

The company is also working to help its partners, who primarily manufacture dresses in China, shift production to their facilities in countries that haven't been hit quite as hard by tariffs.

As of Friday, Cook said David's Bridal had not raised prices. "We want to do everything in our power not to pass anything on to the customer," she told BI.

The smaller bridal shops said they were also working with their manufacturers to avoid passing on costs to brides, but the longer the high tariffs remain, the harder that will be. Still, they said many bridal shops now have plenty of gowns in store that brides could take home, free of tariffs.

Adams, who owns the shop in Louisiana, said it's still too soon to tell how severe the impact will be and that she didn't want to cause fear among brides. "We don't want to freak people out and then a month later everything goes back to normal," she said.

Still, Adams is also concerned that if tariffs do raise prices, it could deter brides from visiting their local brick-and-mortar bridal stores, many of which are longtime fixtures on their local main street.

"We hope people in Washington will give a little," she said. "They don't want people to not get married and not celebrate life moments."

• Wharton has introduced a new concentration for undergrads and a major for MBA students focused on AI.
• The new AI curriculum includes classes on machine learning, ethics, data mining, and neuroscience.
• "Companies are struggling to recruit talent with the necessary AI skill," Wharton's vice dean said.

The nation's oldest business school is evolving for the new, AI-powered world.

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School has unveiled a new MBA major and undergraduate concentration in artificial intelligence. It will be available to students in the fall of 2025 as one of 21 MBA majors alongside options like accounting, finance, marketing, and real estate. For undergraduates who earn a degree in economics, it'll be one of 19 concentrations.

The new curriculum will help students develop both a technical understanding of how businesses are using AI and a more conceptual sense of the technology's economic, social, and ethical implications. Students will be required to take classes in machine learning and ethics and choose from a list of electives spanning data mining to marketing to neuroscience.

One of the required courses will be "Big Data, Big Responsibilities: Toward Accountable Artificial Intelligence," an ethics class.

"Foundations of Deep Learning" will be a new class in the statistics and data science department, giving students an introduction to the technical foundations of AI, Wharton professor Giles Hooker, an advisor for the new AI curriculum, told Business Insider by email. It will cover the technology underpinning the AI boom, including topics from "what is a neural network and how to train it" to "generative AI" to "efficient deep learning" to ensure students have "a solid conceptual grasp on what goes on under the hood in modern AI models," according to the syllabus.

Wharton also updated the syllabi for existing classes, including the management course "Innovation, Change, and Entrepreneurship" and the marketing course "Introduction to Brain Science for Business."

In a university press release announcing the changes, Eric Bradlow, the vice dean of AI and Analytics at Wharton, said, "We are at a critical turning point where practical AI knowledge is urgently needed."

"Companies are struggling to recruit talent with the necessary AI skills, students are eager to deepen their understanding of the subject and gain hands-on experience, and our faculty's expertise on the adoption and human impact of AI is unmatched," he said.

The intersection of AI and business

Wharton faculty began discussing a new AI curriculum last year, Hooker told BI.

In May 2024, Wharton launched the AI and Analytics Initiative to study possible changes to its curriculum, invest in new research, collaborate more with industries, and create open-source generative AI resources, according to Penn Today, the university's official news site.

Through the initiative, Wharton has launched the AI Research Fund to help faculty pursue research at the intersection of AI and business and the Education Innovation Fund to help faculty adopt AI in the classroom.

The initiative was also used to provide ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to all full-time and executive MBA students starting in the fall of 2024 — a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a business school and OpenAI.

In January, Wharton unveiled the Accountable AI Lab, which will produce research on AI governance, regulation, and ethics with a "practical focus on business applications."

Wharton therefore had several building blocks in place for a new curriculum, Hooker told BI. "A lot of what we had to do was to work out how to structure a useful and coherent path through what we offered and then see if there was anything we really needed to add," he said.

Students who graduate with an AI focus will ideally be adept in four areas, Hooker said. They'll have a strong technical knowledge of AI to assess the design and application of AI models in a business and be informed enough to keep up with new AI developments. They'll have a sense of how AI will impact business operations. They'll also have a handle on the ethics of data and automated decision-making and understand the legal frameworks governing AI.

Companies these days are hiring candidates who specialize in just one of these areas. For example, a company might hire an AI researcher to train large language models, a learning and development expert to teach teams how to use the technology or a lawyer who understands data privacy and regulations.

But graduates of Wharton's new program may emerge as a jack-of-all-AI-trades. Their skill sets will be tailored to a future workplace where adaptability might be more valuable than specialization.

"We expect the impact of AI on business to be long and deep. Even without new breakthroughs in human-like reasoning, we can expect AI methods to penetrate even further into business processes and our lives," Hooker said. "The careers and job titles associated with its penetration into business haven't yet been fixed."

• Deloitte is planning layoffs in its government and public services practice.
• Deloitte has seen 127 federal contracts cut or modified since January as DOGE slashes government costs.
• Deloitte leaders said at a meeting Thursday that cuts may cause losses next year, an employee told BI.

Deloitte is preparing for layoffs.

Three current Deloitte employees told Business Insider they heard about the company's plans on a call for the firm's consulting and advisory practices on Thursday.

On the call, known internally as "A+C On Air," the CEO of Deloitte Consulting, Jason Salzetti, said that its government and public services practice would separate a "small percentage" of its employees this month, one employee who was on the call told BI.

The employee added that Salzetti said cuts in the division would conclude by the end of April.

In a statement to Business Insider, Jonathan Gandal, a managing director in Deloitte's reputation division, confirmed the layoffs, writing, "We are taking modest personnel actions based on moderating growth in certain areas, our government clients' evolving needs, and low levels of voluntary attrition."

It was not immediately clear how many people would be affected by the layoffs.

The government and public services practice has over 15,000 employees in the US and is worth $5.5 billion, according to Deloitte's website.

DOGE comes for consulting

The firm is bearing the brunt of DOGE's scrutiny of the federal government's contracts with the consulting industry.

The General Services Administration, which is leading the consulting cost-cutting push, asked 10 firms, including Deloitte, to submit a scorecard detailing their pricing and suggestions for where they could cut costs this past Monday. The results of those submissions have not been published yet, but the GSA is pushing for deeper cuts, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Since January, at least 127 of Deloitte's government contracts have been cut or modified — more than double the number for Booz Allen Hamilton, the second firm most affected by federal cuts — according to data from the White House's DOGE office analyzed by Business Insider earlier this week. That amounts to about $371.8 million in cuts, or over 11% of the $3.3 billion in contracts Deloitte strikes with US federal agencies a year.

At Thursday's meeting, executives acknowledged the recent contract cuts.

Two employees who were on the call told BI that leadership said that Deloitte's fiscal year, which typically runs June 1 through May 31, will end with higher revenue projections than planned.

All three employees added that on the call they heard that performance bonuses, which are typically paid in June, would be paid as expected this fiscal year.

"I'm expecting a healthy, but not jaw-dropping bonus in May, and then not really expecting much of any bonus next year," one of the employees said.

Employees told BI that DOGE's actions have shifted the climate at Deloitte, especially for those who work in its public sector practices.

One employee added that "the tariffs and chaos are beginning to cause alarm bells in commercial as well," referring to the slew of tariffs Trump has proposed since taking office.

Deloitte did not respond to BI's request for comment for more details on bonuses and on DOGE's effect on company culture.

Are you a consultant who has been impacted by DOGE? Reach out to Lakshmi Varanasi at [email protected] or lvaranasi.70 on encrypted messaging app Signal.