Bill Gates is shedding houses that are part of his $132 million Xanadu 2.0 compound—a reversal from his feelings about downsizing

Bill Gates is quietly trimming his footprint around his famed $132 million Xanadu 2.0 compound outside Seattle.

The Microsoft cofounder put up for sale a $4.8 million property “nestled into one of Medina’s most coveted hillsides,” according to the listing—a four-bed, three-bath home that he bought for $1 million in 1995, property records reviewed by Fortune show. 

That’s a retreat from what Gates had said just about a year ago: that he wasn’t looking to downsize.

“My house in Seattle, I admit, is gigantic. My sisters have downsized. I can’t. I like the houses I have,” he told the Times in 2025. “My kids like to come back—that is a luxury. I don’t cook, I don’t make my own bed, but I don’t mind if no one has made it—I wouldn’t notice.”

The house up for sale sits next to his primary 66,000-square-foot lakefront Xanadu 2.0 mansion, which was last appraised in 2025 for $132 million, property records show. The smaller adjacent property Gates just listed is a 2,800-square-foot home purchased through an LLC in Gates’ name shortly after his 1994 marriage to Melinda French Gates in 1994.

They divorced in 2021, and French Gates has recently lamented their marriage, suggesting Gates’ involvement with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was at least one factor in the demise of their marriage. French Gates this week told NPR that Gates and others mentioned in the Epstein files need to address the allegations.

“Whatever questions remain there … for those people, and for even my ex-husband, they need to answer to those things, not me,” she told NPR. “And I am so happy to be away from all the muck that was there.”

The listing goes to show how much of the exclusive hillside neighborhood Gates has acquired during the past three decades in Medina, including the main Xanadu 2.0 residence, surrounded wooded land, as well as several smaller homes and lots that provide a privacy buffer along Lake Washington.

Gates bought the Xanadu land in 1988 for just $2 million—then proceeded to pour about $63 million into the property, which has 24 bathrooms, but oddly just seven bedrooms. 

Melinda Gates told Fortune in a 2008 interview the property, which took a whopping seven years to complete, ended up being “a bachelor’s dream and a bride’s nightmare.” It includes several garages, a trampoline room, an indoor pool, a theater with a popcorn machine, and innumerable software and high-tech displays. French Gates even considered not moving in (as the project was underway during the early years of their marriage).

Even after a 2024 sale of another nearby Medina property that was originally listed at nearly $4.9 million, he remains one of the most dominant individual property owners in the enclave.

A real-estate empire far beyond Seattle

Gates’s cluster of Medina homes is just one piece of a sprawling real-estate and land portfolio that extends well beyond Washington. 

Public filings and land-industry tallies show entities linked to Gates now control roughly 275,000 acres across at least 17 states, making him one of America’s largest private farmland owners. (The top spot goes to Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the world’s most valuable portfolio of sports clubs, including the Los Angeles Rams and London’s Arsenal Football Club.)

But Gates’s agricultural holdings alone give him exposure to everything from corn and soy fields in the Midwest to potato operations in the Pacific Northwest, typically managed by professionals through his Cascade Investment vehicle.

To be sure, Gates said he owns “less than 1/4000 of the farmland in the U.S.,” he said during a 2023 Reddit “ask me anything” session. “I have invested in these farms to make them more productive and create more jobs. There isn’t some grand scheme involved—in fact all these decisions are made by a professional investment team.”

On the residential side, Gates’s properties include Xanadu 2.0 and adjacent homes in Washington, a sprawling $43 million oceanfront mansion in Del Mar, Calif., an $18 million equestrian ranch in Rancho Santa Fe, a $12.5 million golf retreat in Indian Wells, and horse-country properties totaling $38 million in Wellington, Fla., among others. Altogether, they represent nearly $300 million in residential real estate, not counting the underlying farmland or commercial projects tied to his clean-energy ventures.

With that context, the newly listed property appears to be less of an exit from Medina than a modest pruning of the hedges around Xanadu 2.0, but still worth paying attention to since it was an asset he bought during his marriage to French Gates. Recently, it came to light Gates had donated $8 billion to French Gates’ Pivotal Philanthropies as part of their divorce settlement.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com