Rory John Gates Biography

Like his father and elder sister, Jennifer, before him, Rory John Gates attended Lakeside School, Seattle's most elite private school. He is currently a law student at the University of Chicago. A picture of him with other competitors at the Windy City Regional was shared by the University of Chicago Moot Court Team’s Facebook profile in November 2018. Shortly before that, the Chicago Tribune had reported that Bill Gates had purchased a five-bedroom, 3,000 square foot house in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago for $1.25 million, presumably for Rory’s accommodation.

The fact that Rory John Gates was eloquent with words was evident long before he decided to pursue law. In 2010, during a family trip to Europe, he wrote a poem about light after being tutored by his father in the subject of physics of light. 10-year-old Rory was learning about the different forms of poetry as well, and decided to write “a diamante, a seven-line poem in the shape of a diamond that begins with one thing and gradually transitions to end with sort of its opposite”. He began the poem with “light” and transitioned to “dark”, and wanted his poem to be published. So he requested his father to publish it on his blog, which the proud father did in The Gates Notes.

On May 17, 2017, a few days ahead of Rory John Gates’ 18th birthday, his mother Melinda Gates penned an essay for the Time magazine, talking about what kind of a man she had raised. In the article, she mentioned that Rory was “compassionate and curious”, “intelligent and well-read and deeply informed about the wide range of issues”, and had an “obsessive love of puzzles”. However, what made her the proudest was that “Rory is a feminist”. She also fondly remembered how he impressed her with his outlook on gender equality during a trip to East Africa that the two of them took a couple years ago.

Rory John Gates’ parents, who run the ‘Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’, often took their children to developing nations to learn about their struggles and be involved in philanthropic endeavors. His mother told Oprah Daily that the Gates kids “slept … in goat huts in poor villages in Tanzania, walked miles to fetch water, cut wood with dull machetes, learned that a farmer's pig is how he'll pay for a son's education.” It is no surprise that all of them are involved in philanthropy like their parents. Rory, who earned pocket money doing chores around the house, often donated one-third of it to support various charities, prompting his parents to contribute the same amount to the cause as well.

Rory John Gates and his siblings—Jennifer Katharine Gates and Phoebe Adele Gates—had a strict upbringing and were not allowed to have mobile phones until they were 14. Even then, they had limited screen time and were not active on social media like most teenagers. As a result, pictures of the Gates children were scarce until Jennifer started using Instagram after turning 19. For some reason, several tabloids resorted to using pictures of celebrities on articles about the younger Gates. The pictures of American actress and model Rachael Leigh Cook were first used for Jennifer and later for Phoebe as well, while pictures of actor Chord Paul Overstreet were used for Rory. This trend has continued even after rare family vacation photos of Bill and Melinda with their three children were published in the media. While recent pictures of Rory John Gates have surfaced online several times in the past few years, the most-used picture on his online profiles is still one of Overstreet.