The Gen Z ballerina influencer who convinced Melinda Gates to overturn years of political neutrality

Phoebe Gates encourages her mother to speak out about her pro-choice views

Melinda French Gates’s smile was just visible from behind her face mask as she filled out her absentee ballot for the 2020 election.
Having never publicly supported a particular candidate over the potential ramifications for her philanthropic foundation, she carefully covered up her ballot and simply told her Instagram followers: “I voted early.”
Fast forward to 2024. Bill Gates’s ex-wife has bulldozed through her politically neutral veneer to make her first ever endorsements—first for Joe Biden, and then Kamala Harris.
“I’ve never endorsed a presidential candidate before. But this year’s election stands to be so enormously consequential for women and families that, this time, I can’t stay quiet,” French Gates, 60, wrote on social media in June.
While her foray into politics comes after she resigned from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the wake of the couple’s multi-billion-dollar divorce—there are more powerful influences that helped her throw caution to the wind: her daughter.
Former ballerina-turned-influencer Phoebe Gates, 22, is understood to have helped encourage her mother to overturn decades of political neutrality.
Phoebe is a pro-choice activist who has for two years been lamenting the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade to her more than 700,000 social media followers.
Her Instagram is filled with striking pictures of her attending glamorous events such as a Clooney Foundation for Justice fundraiser in Versace and dripping in Cartier jewelry.
Alongside the selection of photographs, she thanked Amal and George Clooney “for your tireless work to advance justice.”
While her profile also shows her wearing swimwear on vacation, these images tend to have a political message.
In 2022, Phoebe shared a picture of herself wearing a white bikini. She wrote: “I’m not shy about my body and/or telling you to keep your bans off of it… Right now, the Supreme Court is prepared to end the constitutional right to abortion. Join me and millions of other women in our fight for this basic human right.”
The youngest Gates once dreamed of becoming a professional dancer, and spent time studying at the School of American Ballet at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City.
But after she finished high school she decided to enroll at Stanford University. She graduated earlier this year and, following an internship at Vogue, is now launching a sustainable fashion brand with Sophia Kianni, who joined an Extinction Rebellion climate hunger strike when she was 17.
Her activism and political messaging is not just for show; she also makes six-figure political donations with the help of political advisers, according to The New York Times.
And she and her older brother Rory Gates, the most private of the dynasty, reportedly urged their mother to ramp up her support of the Democrats in this election.
French Gates previously said her only son, 25, who himself has attended a meeting for progressive mega donors, had “helped me open my eyes and educated me more.”
So far this year the mother-of-three has given more than $13 million to groups that support Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. She is said to have spoken to Ms. Harris’s aides about a joint event and donated close to the maximum of $929,600 to the Democratic candidate’s campaign in July, sources told the New York Times.
She told the newspaper: “Now I do get to make whatever decision I want to make about endorsing or not endorsing on my own” and noted that in previous years “there were more considerations because I was the head of a foundation.”
Less than a month after announcing her departure from the philanthropic organization she founded with her ex-husband, French Gates endorsed Mr. Biden.
French Gates gushes about her children on social media—in particular her daughter Phoebe, who she has shared snippets of recorded conversations about abortion rights with.
“I think that’s why this election is so important, because Gen Z especially has been put in a place where we don’t have a ton of control, whether it’s our own bodies, the economy, the climate, we feel out of control,” Phoebe tells her mother during a recent excerpt.
It is a marked departure from her previous public presence. While she now loudly promotes her pro-choice views on her social media, French Gates previously came under fire for dodging the issue of abortion.
In a TED Talk in 2012 she said she spoke of the need to expand access to contraception, saying: “If we’re going to make progress on this issue, we have to be really clear about what our agenda is… We’re not talking about abortion.”
And in a blog post in 2014 Ms. Gates said she had “struggled” with the issue and had “decided not to engage on it publicly.”