Bill and Melinda Gates: all you need to know about the divorce of the American billionaire couple
“After a lot of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we made the decision to end our marriage,” the couple tweet.
They first met in the 1980s when Melinda joined Bill's Microsoft company.
The billionaire couple have three children and jointly run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The organization has spent billions to fight causes such as infectious diseases and to encourage vaccination of children.
The Gates - along with investor Warren Buffett - are behind the Giving Pledge, which calls on billionaires to pledge the majority of their fortunes to good causes. Bill and Melinda Gates announce divorce after 27 years of marriage, affirming that "we no longer think we can evolve together as a couple".
Bill Gates is the fourth richest person in the world, according to Forbes, and is worth $ 124 billion (£ 89 billion).
He made his money from the company he co-founded in the 1970s, Microsoft, the world's largest software company.
The couple made their divorce announcement on Twitter.
“Over the past 27 years, we have raised three amazing children and built a foundation that works around the world to enable all people to lead healthy and productive lives,” they write.
“We continue to share a belief in this mission and we will continue our work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe that we can grow together as a couple in the next phase of our lives,” the couple wrote.
"We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life."
How did they meet?
Melinda, now 56, joined Microsoft as a product manager in 1987, and the two attended a business dinner together that year in New York City.
They started dating, but as Bill recounted in a Netflix documentary, "We cared about each other a lot and there were only two possibilities: either we were going to break up or we were going to marry."
Melinda said she found Bill - apparently methodical even in matters of the heart - writing a list on a whiteboard with the "pros and cons of getting married."
They married in 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Lanai, said to hire out all local helicopters to keep unwanted guests out.
Bill, 65, stepped down from Microsoft's board last year to focus on his philanthropic activities.
What is the Gates Foundation?
The couple established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000 in Seattle.
The foundation mainly focuses on public health, education and climate change.
Its grants have notably allocated some $ 1.75 billion to vaccination initiatives and research during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2019, the foundation's net assets were over $ 43 billion.
Bill and Melinda Gates injected more than $ 36 billion into the foundation between 1994 and 2018.
source: Reuters News Agency
What role did Melinda play in their campaign?
"Bill and I are equal partners," she told The Associated Press in a 2019 interview. "Men and women should be equal at work."
In her recent memoir titled The Moment of Lift, she spoke of her childhood, life, and private struggles as the wife of a famous personality and a stay-at-home mom with three children.
According to her, working together at the Foundation has improved their relationship. "He had to learn to be his equal, and I had to learn to impose myself and be his equal," she wrote.
Outside of her work with the Foundation, in 2015 she founded Pivotal Ventures, an investment company focused on women and families.
“The world is finally waking up to the fact that none of us can move forward when half of us are held back,” she said at the time. "The data is clear: empowered women are transforming societies."
