![]() ![]() Gates never socialized with Epstein or attended parties with him. (Epstein was then a free man but had pleaded guilty in 2008 to solicitation and procuring a minor for prostitution.)Ĭontacted for comment, Bill Gates' spokeswoman emphasized that any reporting suggesting that he had a personal or professional relationship with Epstein was untrue she also directed E! News to a prior statement from 2019, which read in part: "Although Epstein pursued Gates aggressively, Gates had absolutely no business partnership or personal friendship with Epstein. A former employee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation also told the WSJ that Melinda's concerns about the matter dated as far back as 2013. Unspecified documents reviewed by the WSJ noted that Melinda consulted her advisers after the New York Timesreported in October 2019 that Bill had met with Epstein a number of times, including on several occasions at his Manhattan townhouse. He got her number (and the message) and called to see if she was available for a drink that night, after the myriad meetings on his schedule. But he suggested two weeks from Friday, and she informed him that wasn't spontaneous enough for her, that she had no idea what she'd be up to that far ahead. 20 episode of the What's Her Story With Sam & Amy podcast. Some months went by before Bill first asked her out, taking the opportunity when they bumped into each other (not literally) in the parking lot on a Saturday. "Everybody seemed to work on a Saturday at Microsoft," Melinda explained in the Jan. ![]() Melinda later said of the CEO, "he was funnier than I expected him to be." The high school valedictorian and Duke University grad, whose father brought home an Apple II when she was 14, sparking her interest in programming, sat in one of only two open seats at a trade fair dinner in New York and Bill arrived and took the other chair. Then, of course, there were the personal questions: Why now? What made them arrive at the belief, as they said in their official statement, that they could no longer "grow together as a couple in the next phase of our lives"? What led to their marriage becoming, as Melinda's divorce petition stated, "irretrievably broken"?īill Gates-who started Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, when the idea of personal computers in every home was still science fiction-met Melinda French on the job in 1987, about four months after she joined Microsoft, the only woman in the company's 10-person MBA recruitment class that year. "Working from home-that was a piece that I think we hadn't really individually prepared for quite as much," Melinda told The New York Times in October, the comment now dripping with hindsight.)Īmong the immediate questions in the wake of the split news: What was to become of their eponymous foundation, which since 2000 has dispersed $53.8 billion to public health and development initiatives, including $20 billion of the couple's own Microsoft stock? And what about all their money in general, since one of the first behind-the-scenes details to come out about the parents of three was that they had no prenuptial agreement? (Though there's no such thing as too much space at times, such as during a pandemic. There's no such thing as a billion-dollar divorce that slips under the radar-let alone a $124 billion divorce.Īnd the May 3 announcement that Bill and Melinda Gates were ending their marriage after 27 years came as a shock regardless, the Microsoft cofounder and his partner in global philanthropy innocuously chugging along all this time, their Seattle-area home base a 66,000-square-foot mega-mansion with its own beach on the shore of Lake Washington. ![]()
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