Based on actual evidence, what does the Gates foundation actually do with it's money? Be specific, what foundations do they donate to, what companies are their money going to?

1. How the money gets to the foundation: the Trust and filings

An investment vehicle called the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust holds the endowment assets, manages investments and transfers proceeds to the operating foundation; the Trust reported grants to the Foundation of roughly $6.8 million in 2022 and $6.1 million in 2021 in its audited statements, and the two entities share the same trustees while remaining legally distinct ^{[5] [6]}. The foundation publishes audited financial statements, Form 990 filings and an “Attachment D” detail of paid grants so researchers can trace both high-level totals and individual grants ^{[2] [5]}.

2. Where the foundation sends most grant dollars: program areas and big partners

Annual reports and the foundation’s own financial summaries show spending organized by divisions—global health, global development, U.S. programs (including education)—with major, multiyear grant commitments recorded in the committed grants database ^{[3] [7] [1]}. Historical large-scale partners include vaccine alliances and disease-eradication initiatives: for example, publicly available reporting and summaries note multi‑hundred‑million dollar commitments to vaccine efforts and to Gavi (the Vaccine Alliance), where the foundation has been a top donor across multi‑year cycles ^{[8] [9]}.

3. Grants versus program‑related investments and subsidiaries

The foundation distinguishes grant payments and direct charitable contracts from program-related investments (PRIs); its public “annual report” summaries explicitly exclude PRIs from headline financial figures, meaning some capital deployed to mission-aligned companies, social enterprises, or catalytic financing vehicles does not appear in the same line as grants ^{[3] [9]}. The foundation also consolidates subsidiaries such as the Gates Medical Research Institute in its audited statements; that institute is a nonprofit subsidiary focused on biomedical R&D and posts its own Form 990s while being consolidated into the foundation’s financials ^[4].

4. Transparency tools: grants database and tax filings

Researchers can look up individual committed grants back to 1994 in the foundation’s committed grants database, and the foundation makes full audited financial statements and 990-PF filings available on its financials page—materials that list grantee names, grant purposes and amounts and that are linked from public databases such as ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer ^{[1] [2] [10]}. ProPublica’s nonprofit pages mirror the foundation and the Trust filings and provide machine-readable versions of IRS schedules for deeper forensic review ^{[10] [11]}.

5. Local and family philanthropy alongside the global foundation

The Gates family operates separate philanthropic vehicles—such as the Gates Family Foundation—that make community and regional grants (for example, Colorado-focused education, housing and entrepreneurship grants recorded in their reports); those family foundation grants are distinct from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s global program portfolio and have their own grant databases and annual reports ^{[12] [13]}.

6. Limits of the public record and competing narratives

Public documents show detailed grant recipients, big-ticket commitments to vaccine alliances and disease programs, use of a Trust to fund operations, and separate reporting for PRIs and subsidiaries ^{[2] [5] [3] [4] [9]}. Sources provided do not exhaustively catalog every corporate counterparty, private equity holding, or PRI recipient; therefore this review does not assert a complete list of companies that receive foundation capital because those details may be recorded in PRIs, subsidiary filings or investment schedules not included in the headline annual summaries ^{[3] [4]}.