Bill and Melinda Gates announce divorce after 27 years of marriage
The Microsoft co-founder and his wife said they would continue to "work together in their foundation," which fights poverty.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates announced their divorce on Monday after 27 years of marriage. “After careful consideration and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage,” the couple tweeted separately, who reside in Washington state.
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) May 3, 2021
The Gates, who have three children, announced that they would continue to "work together at their foundation," the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which fights poverty and disease, but that they no longer believe they "can. evolve together as a couple ”. Bill Gates, 65, and his wife, 56, pleaded with the audience to give their families the "space and privacy" they need to "begin to adjust to this new life." They did not say anything about the reasons that prompted them to separate.
Fourth richest man in the world
Bill Gates is, according to the latest Forbes ranking, the fourth richest man in the world, with a fortune estimated at $ 124 billion. It places him behind two other Americans, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and Frenchman Bernard Arnault, and ahead of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. If he made his fortune thanks to Microsoft, he resigned as president in 2014 and now devotes himself mainly to philanthropy.
Solicited by many leaders, he has made multiple interventions since the start of the pandemic, against which his foundation has spent more than a billion dollars, according to the New York Times. This visibility into an illness that fueled political tensions has made him a frequent target of conspiracy theories on social media. The foundation he created with his wife Melinda is considered the largest private foundation in the world. It has spent some $ 53 billion in twenty years and employs nearly 1,600 people, according to its official website.
Melinda Gates spoke of tensions in a book released in 2019
Even if they will continue to work together within their foundation, which they co-chair alongside Warren Buffett, their divorce could lead to changes in the way it is funded, some observers argued. In particular, it is unclear whether Bill Gates will continue to fund it as regularly as he has done so far.
Bill and Melinda Gates met at a dinner party in New York City shortly after Melinda joined Microsoft in 1987. In a documentary released on Netflix in 2019, Inside Bill's Brain, the co-founder Microsoft had explained that after dating for a year they found themselves faced with the obligation to make a choice: "either break up or get married."
Bill had made a whiteboard list of “pros and cons of marriage,” Melinda laughed. The Gates' divorce comes after that of another multi-billionaire couple, Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie Scott, in 2019. The separation of the latter was however announced after the publication of information on an extramarital affair of the founder of Amazon.
In the case of the Gates, no recent news had hinted at a separation, although Melinda Gates had spoken of tensions in the marriage, most notably in her book The Moment of Lift, released in 2019. MacKenzie Scott has since become the 22nd person. the richest on the planet and an influential philanthropist, with some $ 6 billion in donations in 2020 alone. She announced her remarriage last month.
