https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1582133514823-be4368438bd042e3b60f5cec6b377d17/Stafford_June_2019_508.pdf

Mary Gates was a lifelong philanthropist who died in 1994 from breast cancer. Gates’s parents, though they struggled to control their son, played powerful roles in his professional development.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Bill and Mary Gates clashed in the former’s early teenage years, when he began to develop intellectually and rebel against his mother’s rules of decorum at home. His parents took him to a therapist, who advised them to relax their control over their son.

Years later, when Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, they supported him. Later, it was Gates’s mother who suggested he devote some of his time and money to charity. Though he initially resisted, he agreed to allocate some Microsoft money to the charity United Way of America (now United Way Worldwide), where she held several leadership roles.

After she died, Gates’s father, William H. Gates Jr., urged his son to take philanthropy more seriously. Thus was born an early version of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, of which William H. Gates Jr. is a co-chair.

Today the foundation has a $39.6 billion endowment. Buffett serves as a trustee.

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