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The Gates Foundation Trust, founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, recently disclosed that it sold its final 7.7 million shares of Microsoft during the first quarter of 2026 — a roughly $3.2 billion exit that ends a decades-long position in the company Gates cofounded (1).

A very different story had already broken on the morning of the disclosure. Hours before the Gates filing hit the SEC on May 15, Bill Ackman, founder and CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, used a lengthy X post to announce a brand-new Microsoft position (2). Pershing’s 13F filing, filed later that evening, showed roughly 5.65 million shares, worth around $2.09 billion, on the books at quarter-end (3).

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The following morning, Ackman explained he used Pershing’s holdings of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, to pay for it. “To be clear, our sale of $GOOG was not a bet against the company,” he wrote on X (4). “We are very bullish long term on Alphabet. But at current valuations and in light of our finite capital base, we used $GOOG as a source of funds for $MSFT.”

Why is Gates selling?

The 7.7 million-share sale is the final tranche of a multi-year sale by the Gates Foundation Trust. The trust held roughly 28.5 million Microsoft shares at the end of the first quarter of 2025, trimmed to 7.7 million by year-end and zeroed out this quarter.

This comes after Gates announced in May 2025 that the foundation will sunset operations in 2045 and spend roughly $200 billion on charitable work over the next 20 years (5).

“There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people,” he wrote. “That is why I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned.”

A foundation winding down its endowment doesn’t have a choice but to sell — it has to fund the giveaway.

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Why is Ackman bullish on Microsoft?

Pershing started stockpiling Microsoft in February, right after the company's fiscal Q2 2026 earnings sent the stock tumbling (2). It kept buying through a stretch where Microsoft was down sharply on the year and well off its July 2025 record high.