The Microsoft founder said he would accelerate his giving through his foundation, the Gates Foundation, which he founded with his then-wife, Melinda French Gates.

"People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that 'he died rich' will not be one of them," he wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

Gates, 69, said that his foundation has already given away $100 billion towards health and development projects, and he is expecting to spend another $200 billion over the next two decades.

“During the first 25 years of the Gates Foundation – powered in part by the generosity of Warren Buffett – we gave away more than $100 billion,” Gates wrote.

“Over the next two decades, we will double our giving,” Gates wrote. The blog post contained a chart showing Gates’s net worth plummeting 99 per cent over the next 20 years. Gates is currently listed as the 13th on the Forbes “real-time” billionaire list, with a net worth of $112.6 billion.

“There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.”

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched in 2000, the same year Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO.

Melinda exited the foundation three years after the couple’s divorce in 2024.

The former Microsoft CEO referenced progress in launching global public health efforts, including campaigns to eradicate polio and the creation of a new vaccine for rotavirus that has helped reduce the number of children who die from diarrhea each year by 75 per cent.

“By accelerating our giving, my hope is we can put the world on a path to ending preventable deaths of mums and babies and lifting millions of people out of poverty,” Gates said in the blog.