"Property records show Gates has listed for sale a $4.8 million, four‑bedroom home in Medina, Wash., that sits directly beside his primary 66,000‑square‑foot Xanadu 2.0 mansion on Lake Washington. The 2,800‑square‑foot house, purchased for about $1 million in 1995 via an LLC shortly after his marriage to Melinda French Gates, is one of several smaller properties that form a privacy buffer around the main estate."
"Gates bought the Xanadu land in 1988 for around $2 million and poured about $63 million into a seven‑year build that produced one of the world's most recognizable tech mogul compounds, complete with multiple garages, a trampoline room, an indoor pool, a private theater, and extensive digital displays. French Gates told Fortune in 2008 the project was "a bachelor's dream and a bride's nightmare" and considered not moving in, underscoring how closely the property has been associated with Gates' personal tastes and outsized ambitions."
"The listing marks a notable shift from Gates' own insistence just a year ago that he had no intention of shrinking his residential footprint. In 2025, he told the London Times that, unlike his siblings, he could not imagine downsizing from the "gigantic" Seattle home, saying he liked the houses he owned and that his children still enjoyed coming back."
Bill Gates listed a $4.8 million, four‑bedroom house in Medina that sits adjacent to his 66,000‑square‑foot Xanadu 2.0 estate, reducing one layer of the privacy buffer around the main residence. The 2,800‑square‑foot house was purchased in 1995 for about $1 million via an LLC shortly after his marriage to Melinda French Gates. Gates assembled much of the wooded hillside over three decades and anchored the enclave with a main residence appraised near $132 million in 2025. Gates bought the Xanadu land in 1988 and spent roughly $63 million on construction. In 2025 he had said he would not downsize; analysts view the sale as modest pruning rather than a full exit from Medina, while renewed scrutiny of past ties to Jeffrey Epstein and a lower public profile coincided with his absence from a major AI summit.
Read at Fortune
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