Microsoft exec Jeff Raikes to run Gates Foundation

SEATTLE — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said Monday that Microsoft Corp. executive Jeff Raikes will take over in September as chief executive of the world's largest charitable foundation.

The foundation has been looking for a new leader since chief executive Patty Stonesifer announced in February that she would step down.

Raikes has been president in Microsoft's business software division, responsible for such things as the Office software suite, Microsoft's server software and applications that help businesses track customers and business processes.

In the past decade, the Gates Foundation has given away more than $16 billion, mostly in global health, global development and U.S. education.

Raikes will be the foundation's second leader since its inception in 1997. He has much in common with Stonesifer, another former Microsoft executive and friend of Bill and Melinda Gates, the co-chairs of their family foundation, which now has more than 500 employees and an endowment of $37.3 billion.

"I'm absolutely thrilled to be joining the Gates Foundation," Raikes said Monday. "This is truly a dream job."

Melinda Gates said that when their friend Raikes expressed interest in the job, his selection was far from a done deal, however.

Raikes, 49, who announced in January he was retiring from Microsoft in September, said he thought before Stonesifer's announcement that he would like to play a role in the foundation's future but was unsure what he would like to do.

He went through the same screening process as the more than 150 other candidates. As a finalist, he was interviewed by top executives of the foundation and needed the blessing of the foundation's third-biggest donor, Warren Buffett, head of Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Melinda Gates said she and her husband each interviewed "quite a few" candidates, but they kept coming back to the same idea.

"We really wanted to find someone to build the organization as it was," she said. "We saw in Jeff the right leadership qualities."

Raikes, who grew up in Nebraska, said he met Buffett years ago when the Gateses and Buffett came to his farm and accompanied him to a Nebraska Cornhuskers football game.