MICROSOFT founder Bill Gates has revealed he won't be leaving his estimated $56 billion fortune to his children when he dies.

Instead the global software giant brainchild, who ranks alongside the Medicis, Romanovs, Rothschilds and Rockefellers as one of history's wealthiest people, told UK newspaper The Sun that his billions will be spent defeating global poverty.

"I will give the kids some money but not a meaningful percentage," he said.



"Setting the number so that they need to work but they feel reasonably taken care of is hard to figure out."

Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have three children - Jennifer, 14, Rory, 11, and eight-year-old Phoebe.

"I knew I didn't think it was a good idea to give the money to my kids," Mr Gates said.



"That wouldn't be good either for my kids or society. So the question was, 'Can I find something that had incredible impact?' I knew I wanted to do that."

Along with his wife, he launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which so far donated $30 billion to fund mass vaccination programs to eradicate diseases such as polio and TB.



It also championed the search for the Holy Grails of health - vaccines for Aids and malaria.

Mr Gates is currently working on the U.N. Millennium Development Goals - a set of targets to reduce global poverty by 2015 - as a summit begins in New York on Monday.

"Once you improve health then the population comes down because people have fewer children because the survival rates are better," he said.



"When population comes down your ability to eat, to educate, to have jobs and to get countries to be self-sustaining is pretty phenomenal. Aid isn't something that will have to continue for ever."

Read more about Bill Gates revealing he won't be leaving $53bn fortune to his children at The Sun.

