Bill & Melinda Portfolio Heatmap: See the Gates Strategy

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust's 13F lists 23 stocks worth roughly $35 billion, with a heavy top-five tilt. A Bill & Melinda portfolio heatmap shows the dividend engine behind it and the four pillars the Trust's book splits into, all in a single visual.

Explore the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation heatmap to see every holding sized by the metric you pick.

Where to start on the heatmap

The heatmap opens on Percent Change, showing how each holding moved over a chosen time frame. Switch between 1-day, 1-week, 1-month, and year-to-date for momentum.

Of the 13 metric views, four reveal strategy: Market Cap, Dividend Yield Forward, P/E Forward, and Profit Margin Gross. Valuation and growth views (PEG, Revenue Growth, Return on Equity) add depth once the shape is clear.

Best for: seeing what the Trust owns right now without scanning a 13F PDF. Limitation: 13F filings report the previous quarter-end, so tile positions lag 45 to 75 days behind reality.

The four pillars of the Gates portfolio

The Trust's 13F splits cleanly into four pillars the heatmap makes visible. The mandate behind it is simple: maximize returns, do not lose money, and keep enough liquidity to fund a $9 billion annual grant budget.

Anchor positions. Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) sits near 28% of the portfolio, funded by Warren Buffett's ongoing share gifts to the Foundation. Microsoft (MSFT), once the dominant holding, is down to around 11% after eight consecutive quarters of trims to fund grant-making.

Moat industrials. Waste Management (WM), Canadian National Railway (CNI), Caterpillar (CAT), Deere (DE), Paccar (PCAR), and FedEx (FDX) form the second layer. Waste and rail are regulatory monopolies, heavy equipment is a duopoly. All pay dividends with decades-long reinvestment runways.

Defensive consumer. Walmart (WMT), McDonald's (MCD), Kraft Heinz (KHC), Hormel (HRL), Anheuser-Busch (BUD), Coca-Cola FEMSA (KOF), and Coupang (CPNG) supply recession-resistant cash flow.

Mission-adjacent quality. Danaher (DHR), Ecolab (ECL), West Pharmaceutical (WST), Veralto (VLTO), and Schrödinger (SDGR) sit in life sciences, water treatment, and drug delivery. Each overlaps the Foundation's own grant priorities in global health and sanitation.

The heatmap views that reveal the strategy

Market Cap view

The market cap view sizes every tile by the underlying company's market cap, not the Trust's position weight. BRK.B, MSFT, and WMT tile large because the businesses are large. The smaller tiles (SDGR, CPNG, MSGS) flag where the Trust has bought into less mature companies alongside the mega-caps.

Dividend Yield Forward

The Trust earns hundreds of millions in annual dividend income. Switch to this view and the yielders show deeper color intensity: CNI, KHC, HRL, CAT, DE, WM. Companies with zero or low yield (SDGR, MSGS, CPNG) tile pale. Most holdings pay dividends, and the heatmap makes the income engine obvious.

Use it when: you want to see which positions fund the Foundation's grant budget. Pair with the dividend growth rate to see how that income itself compounds.

P/E Forward

Valuation discipline shows up here. Lower multiples flag where the P/E ratio stays cheap (cyclical industrials, beaten-down consumer). Premium multiples mark the quality names the Trust pays up for.

Profit Margin Gross

The quality filter. Large tiles with strong profit margins (MSFT, DHR, ECL, WST) reveal the premium-business side of the portfolio. Weaker margins (CPNG, KHC) cluster at the other end.

What the heatmap reveals about the Trust's strategy

Low turnover. Most tiles stay in the same place quarter after quarter. The Trust holds for years, sometimes decades. Compare the heatmap to a filing from three years ago and the core names barely move.

Quality-first, dividend-second. Every pillar carries strong free cash flow. Within that, the moat-industrial and defensive-consumer pillars do the dividend work. The anchors contribute capital appreciation and, increasingly, liquidity for grant-making through share buybacks and outright trims.

Mission alignment without subsidy. Healthcare, water, and equipment names overlap Foundation grant areas, but they are held for investment returns, not philanthropic discount. The Trust picks businesses the Foundation would approve of, where the economics stand alone.

Reading your results

Each tile shows the ticker and the value for the selected metric. Color intensity signals how far that value sits from the portfolio average: deeper colors flag outliers. Tile size depends on the metric you pick. On market cap or dividend yield, size scales with the value.

Cross-reference two views when a stock stands out. A small tile on market cap but a large tile on profit margin hints at a quality position inside a smaller company. A large market cap tile fading on percent change hints at a holding under pressure.

13F filings report the previous quarter-end. A Microsoft trim recorded in November already happened in Q3. The heatmap shows the quarter-end snapshot, not real-time activity.

Compare the Gates layout to Warren Buffett's portfolio heatmap: Buffett spreads across 40+ names, the Gates Trust concentrates in 23. For how visual encoding works across every Marketgenius view, see the stock market heatmap complete guide. Then open the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation heatmap to explore each metric.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust still own Microsoft? Yes, but the stake is much smaller than it once was. After eight consecutive quarters of trims, Microsoft sits near 11% of the portfolio, down from highs above 25%. Sales fund the Foundation's grant budget, not a negative view on the stock itself.

Why is Berkshire Hathaway the biggest holding, not Microsoft? Warren Buffett has gifted Berkshire shares to the Foundation since 2006. Those contributions added directly to the trust's BRK.B stake. At roughly 28% of the portfolio as of the Q4 2025 filing, Berkshire outranks Microsoft despite active trimming on both names.

How often does the Bill & Melinda heatmap update? The heatmap reflects the most recent 13F filing, filed within 45 days of each quarter-end. That means four updates per year: mid-February, mid-May, mid-August, and mid-November. Tile positions show the previous quarter-end, not real-time trades.

Can I replicate the Gates Foundation portfolio? You can copy the tickers, but the strategy is not about tickers. The Foundation trades for spend-down liquidity, tax-exempt status, and a 20-year closure horizon, none of which apply to an individual investor. Study the structure instead: concentration on moat businesses, dividend cushion, long holding periods.