The Gates Foundation’s CEO on Managing a Planned Sunset

The Gates Foundation's CEO Mark Suzman faces a rare leadership challenge: He is managing an organization that has announced its intention to spend $200 billion during the next 20 years—double what the organization dispensed in its first 25 years—while working to permanently close its doors on December 31, 2045.

Suzman, who joined the foundation in 2007 as director of global development policy, advocacy, and special initiatives, and became CEO in 2020, says the finality and scale of his mandate actually provides clarity and focus. “It allows us to be very predictable and reliable for the next two decades,” he says. “That’s a luxury for a CEO.”

With Clarity Comes Focus

The foundation announced it is sunsetting earlier this year, accelerating a shutdown that the Gates Foundation's CEO says had always been part of the organization’s long-term plan. At the time of the announcement, chair and board member Bill Gates said the nonprofit would concentrate its efforts on three areas: ending preventable deaths of mothers and babies, eradicating deadly infectious diseases, and putting millions of people on the path to economic prosperity.

That means some programs will “graduate,” or be reworked. Some existing initiatives that fall outside the focus areas or may not be achievable by 2045 are moving into new partnerships. For example, the foundation’s work to foster technology and tools to expand economic opportunity for Americans is now part of NextLadder Ventures, a coalition of philanthropies including Ballmer Group (cofounded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer), Valhalla Foundation, Stand Together, and others.

The Gates Foundation's CEO on Leadership Through Change

I asked Suzman about leading a team of more than 2,000 mission-driven employees—some of whom are seeing projects deprioritized—through this lengthy transition. He contends that the foundation has always had to make hard choices. “When you’re part of an institution that has a wider set of goals, there will be trade-offs—trade-offs about how we allocate our internal resources, how we allocate Bill’s voice. We work on this by trying to pull people up to our shared set of goals,“ he says.