Short answer: No. No reputable source documents Jewish parentage or ancestry for Bill Gates, who was born in Seattle on October 28, 1955 to William H. Gates Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates and raised in a Congregational Protestant church. As an adult he has described himself as not a conventional believer, while saying the moral systems of religion matter and attending the Catholic church his then-wife Melinda belonged to.
What the record actually shows
- October 28, 1955: Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates Sr., a lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates, a corporate director and University of Washington regent. He has two sisters, Kristi and Libby, and his maternal grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. His Wikipedia biography describes his ancestry as English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish.
- Childhood: Per the same biography, the family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.
- June 10, 1994: Mary Maxwell Gates died of cancer at 64. The paper reported her memorial service would be held the following Thursday at University Congregational Church in Seattle, the family's church, according to the Seattle Times. The paper noted she was born in North Seattle in 1929 and was the granddaughter of a prominent Seattle banker and civic figure, J.W. Maxwell.
- 1995: In a PBS interview with David Frost, Gates said he was not a regular churchgoer and was not a strong believer in the specific elements of Christianity.
- March 2014: In a Rolling Stone interview, Gates said, "The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important," and, "We've raised our kids in a religious way," adding that they have gone to the Catholic church Melinda goes to and he participates in. He added, "I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know." The quotes are reported by the Christian Post.
- Family faith: The Catholic attendance came through Melinda French Gates, who was raised Roman Catholic, educated at Ursuline Academy, a Catholic girls' high school in Dallas, and is a practicing Catholic, per her Wikipedia biography. The couple married in 1994 in Lanai, Hawaii, and their divorce was finalized August 2, 2021.
- February 4, 2025: Gates published a memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, covering his Seattle childhood through Microsoft's early years. Nothing in the documented account of that childhood involves Jewish family or practice.
Why people ask
The question is not driven by anything in Gates's biography. It is driven by an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The World Jewish Congress, describing the global-elite puppet-master myth, says the myth targets "others whom proponents of the myth mistakenly believe to be Jewish, such as Bill Gates." That is a Jewish institutional source stating plainly that the belief is mistaken.
The theory hardened during the pandemic. Reporting by Erica Hellerstein for Coda Story, published March 15, 2021, documented conspiracy content calling Gates a secret "Jewish aristocrat," and cited an October 2020 UK government report finding that posts about the vaccine often featured Gates, "who conspiracists believe is a 'crypto-Jew.'" Those are the smear's own words, quoted here only to name what is being spread. Jewish writers pushed back early: in the Jewish Journal on May 7, 2020, Micha Danzig wrote that "these conspiracy theories about Gates and Fauci, which often are promoted by a cohort of anti-vaxxers as well as anti-Semites, are specious and baseless."
Asking whether a man is secretly Jewish because a conspiracy network says so is not a biographical question. It is the conspiracy repeating itself.
Bill Gates and Israel
Gates has a long, business-first relationship with Israel. He made his first trip there on October 25-26, 2005, a roughly 24-hour visit built around a meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and a Microsoft-Israel cooperation agreement. He told Ynet that "Israel is part of the Silicon Valley" and that he was excited to be there, while declining to comment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On February 25, 2016, marking 25 years of Microsoft's Israel R&D center, he said Israeli work in analytics and security was "improving the world," per The Times of Israel. At COP26 on November 2, 2021, he and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett agreed to form a joint Israel and Gates Foundation working group on climate innovation, also reported by The Times of Israel. Full details in our companion piece Does Bill Gates Support Israel?.
The bottom line
Bill Gates is not Jewish. His documented background is a Seattle childhood in the Congregational Christian tradition, an adulthood in which he says he is not a regular churchgoer but values religion's moral systems, and years of attending the Catholic church his then-wife belonged to. The only thing feeding the question is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish organizations have already identified as false.
Celebrate your own story
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
