When your dad is Bill Gates, you’d think your last name would open every door. But Phoebe Gates didn’t even use it until high school. And that wasn’t an accident.
In a recent episode of her podcast “The Burnouts,” the 22-year-old entrepreneur and Stanford grad explained that her parents intentionally kept the family name under wraps during her childhood.
“My parents were really intentional about making sure we didn’t use my dad’s last name Gates until we were in high school—we went by my mom’s last name,” she said. “And it really allowed me to be able to make friends in like a really authentic way.”
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That low-profile approach was Melinda French Gates‘ idea. Long before the 2021 divorce that split one of the world’s most high-profile power couples, Melinda had already set the tone for a very different kind of upbringing.
“I had been around a lot of kids from wealth in college,” Melinda said in a Vogue joint interview with her daughters published this month. “And I knew how I did not want my children to turn out. I really thought about some of the middle-class values I grew up with.”
To shield them from the spotlight and entitlement, she made sure the kids used her maiden name, French, throughout elementary school. According to Melinda, even letting Bill drop the kids off at school was carefully delayed for the first few weeks so their classmates wouldn’t immediately connect the dots.
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The goal wasn’t secrecy for secrecy’s sake—it was about letting the kids be themselves before being seen as heirs to one of the richest men in the world. And for most of her life, Phoebe just wanted to blend in.
“Before I’d be like, ‘Oh, this is my family’ or like ‘This is who I’m related to. Come over to my house,’ I don’t think it would have necessarily been good for me to be fully like in the spotlight as a child,” she said on “The Burnouts.”
That mindset helped shape more than just their social life. In a March Elle Women of Impact feature, Melinda elaborated on the decision to let each child choose their identity when they were older. “I wanted the kids to be seen for who they were,” she said. “My oldest daughter went in with Gates; she felt like she was ready to take that name on. My son chose not to. He used French all the way through high school.”
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And the legacy behind that last name is hard to ignore. Bill Gates, who topped the list of the world’s richest people for 18 years, still lives in the 66,000-square-foot Lake Washington mansion known as Xanadu 2.0. The high-tech compound is complete with six kitchens, a trampoline room, 24 bathrooms, and an indoor pool. Gates says he has no plans to downsize, calling it a “gigantic” home he still enjoys—and one his kids like to return to, which he considers a “luxury.”
But for Melinda, protecting her kids from being defined by that name too early wasn’t just personal—it was a parenting philosophy. They could inherit the fortune, but they didn’t have to inherit the baggage that came with it. Not right away.
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