Melinda Gates: the feminist partner and philanthropist who knew how to negotiate everything with her husband, even vacations with Bill's lover
After 27 years of marriage, three daughters, and $ 130 billion to distribute, the Microsoft founder and his wife decided to end their marriage. Why Melinda was from the first moment so much more than the tycoon's wife
For 27 years Melinda and Bill Gates were much more than one of the richest married couples in the world: they were, above all things, a partnership.
The creator of Microsoft was always used to command and be revered for the lucidity that made him the youngest billionaire in the world at age 30, and instead that Catholic girl from Dallas challenged him from the beginning: he had a passion for the programming after growing up playing hours on an Apple II, his main competition.
The daughter of an aerospace engineer and homemaker, and first in her class since elementary school, Melinda Ann French had job openings from several companies when she added an MBA to her degrees in Economics and Computer Science from Duke University. That, too, dazzled Gates - the greatest known success story from a Harvard dropout - who would joke proudly about it throughout his relationship: his wife was far more educated than he was.
In her memoir, The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World (2019), a trigger to talk about gender equality, the issue on which she has concentrated the most since its founding, Melinda tells that she came to Microsoft by following the advice of an IBM Human Resources manager, where he was doing an internship: “Ours is a great company, but what Microsoft is going to grow is crazy. If you have the talent that I believe in, your chances of making a career there as a woman are going to be meteoric ".
He could not foresee, of course, that very soon he would meet the CEO of the company in which as soon as he stepped foot he felt “that he was seeing the future”, and that what was going to change in a meteoric way would not only be his career, but also his rest of his life. Melinda was 23 years old at the time and one of the few girls at the software giant, and although she was fascinated with the job and the opportunities, at some point she thought about quitting: “The problem was the culture, competitive to an extreme where no matter how casual the meetings were, any debate was a battle to the last detail, as if everyone was always rehearsing the strategy to introduce Bill. "
Indeed, opportunities occurred at the speed of technology. It was 1987 and she had been a product manager for Microsoft in Seattle for four months when she first traveled to New York to attend a trade show, which ended with a meal where she sat next to Gates. "It was much funnier than he expected," she would say later.
Something remained pending that night and, when they met again months later, in the company's parking lot in Seattle, he did not hesitate to ask her out. Of course, he did it with all the romanticism of which a 32-year-old young man who had become a millionaire programming computers was capable: "Are you free on Friday night in two weeks?" She laughed: “How are you going to know that in such anticipation? My schedule doesn't go that far! If you want to go out with me, you're going to have to be more spontaneous! ”.
Gates was off the hook: from their first meeting with him, he had made every possible inquiry about his employee and had meticulously planned that casual crossover. In general, no one laughed at him or said no, everyone tried to please him. Two hours later he telephoned Melinda. He explained that her schedule was always overflowing, although he really wanted to see her: "Right now I have two more meetings and a dinner, but would you like us to go for a drink later?" She agreed: "I think that's a bit more spontaneous, yes."
Raising her future husband to spontaneity was going to be almost as arduous a job as her role in leading the development of iconic products such as the Bob program - from which the Comic Sans typeface arose -, the Expedia website and the encyclopedia. Encarta. They quickly discovered that they had a lot in common: they both loved puzzles, and they were both wildly competitive.
"I think I really intrigued him when I beat him on a math problem and the first time we played Clue, the board game where you have to see who killed who in which room and with what weapon - Melinda writes in her memoirs, prefaced by former President Barack Obama. He told me that I had to read The Great Gatsby, her favorite novel, and he was speechless when I replied that he had already read it twice. I think at that moment he realized that he had found his match. "
But, far from Pascal's old maxim, Gates's heart needed logical reasons. They had been dating for several years when Melinda found him in her room writing down a list of pros and cons on the advisability of marrying her with a marker on a blackboard. "When he told me that he loved me, I thought: 'Wow, what is going to happen now?' - Gates himself says in the Netflix documentary Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (2019) -. We loved each other a lot and there were only two possibilities: either we separated or we got married ”. Who was his wife for 27 years then helps to decode the tycoon: "He wanted to get married, but he didn't know if he could commit to marriage and Microsoft at the same time."
History indicates that the sum of the arguments in favor outweighed the negatives, although the ultra-rational approach of the genius behind the personal computer revolution did not change with his commitment. Even at his wedding party at the Manele Bay Hotel in Maui, Hawaii, in 1994, Bill "did a surprisingly quick math" to show how to cut the wedding cake into exactly equal portions for each guest. Another striking fact from that day: she wore a dress for which she paid only US $ 20,000, something extraordinarily cheap for someone with her fortune; Melinda was always modest in her expenses.
They were newly married when Fortune magazine revealed that Gates' wife had suffered "a personal crisis." The couple could not agree on the plans of the house of more than 12,000 m2 that they were going to share on the outskirts of Seattle. Bill had settled on a design that looked like the wet dream of Tom Hanks' character in I Wanna Be Big: It would have several garages, a huge room with a trampoline, an indoor pool, a movie theater with a popcorn machine, and the enough tech displays to make them feel like they were living "inside a video game." "It's chaos," she decreed, who considered it impossible that under these conditions the mansion could become a good place to raise a family.
Finally, they reached an agreement. They added intimate spaces, a study for Melinda, and a more open view of the gardens. Now it also transpired that although the couple did not sign a prenuptial agreement, the plans for that house were not the only thing they negotiated. Before meeting Melinda, Gates had a multi-year relationship with software entrepreneur Ann Winblad, whom he never forgot.
According to the biographer of Microsoft's founder, Walter Isaacson, they had a tradition: Even after they were apart, each spring they spent a long weekend together at Winblad's country house on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, where they rode buggies. , they practiced hang gliding, strolled along the beach and “shared their thoughts about the world and themselves”. Gates confessed in an article published in Time in 1997: "When I was thinking of marrying Melinda, I called Ann and asked for her approval." Surely he ended up noting her response among the pros on that list, Ann told him that Melinda "would be a good match for him because she had great intellectual strength." Another point in his favor: his biographer assures that his wife accepted that he continue to maintain with Winblad the rite of being alone one weekend a year.
There are many who, now that the Gates have announced their divorce, have set their eyes on the 70-year-old businesswoman and married to the actor's brother Kevin Kline, with whom the marriage was even commercially associated in Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, a venture company focused on investing in software. And no one can say so far that it has not been part of an agreement of a couple in which everything was calculated: even the children.
As parents they were just as practical. Melinda became pregnant with her eldest daughter two years after the wedding, just before a vacation in China. "It was an important trip for us, because he never took time out of the company," says the philanthropist in her book, where she confesses that she was about to hide it from her husband. “He was happy, and he couldn't believe that I had thought not to tell him. But much less that I had made the decision to stop working when Jennifer was born, ”she writes.
A fervent advocate for women's rights, Melinda realizes that she was able to make that decision because she had the money to do so, even though Bill was then devastated to momentarily lose his partner in the company. “I told him: we are lucky not to need my income. This is about how we want to raise our children. You are not going to work fewer hours, and I don't see a way to add to my day the hours I need to do my job well at the office and at home at the same time ”.
Soon Rory (21) and Phoebe (18) would also arrive, and despite the fact that the couple was always united, in her book Melinda also acknowledges that she felt lonely while raising her children and that sometimes made her marriage "Incredibly difficult." “Bill was the CEO of Microsoft all the time. He was more than busy, everyone needed him more than his family. And I was like, 'OK, maybe he wanted to be a father in theory, not really.' In a note she gave to the Sunday Times for their Silver Wedding, she confessed: “I remember days when being together was really so hard that I was wondering, 'Can I do this?'
By 2000, they had reached a new agreement like the partners they had always been: Bill was going to take care of more parenting-related tasks, starting with taking the girls to school, which required two hours a day. And they were really going to be a professional society again: Melinda was not going to return to Microsoft, on the contrary, it was Bill who was going to leave his position as CEO to be able to dedicate more time to his family and their new common project, the Foundation. Bill & Melinda Gates.
In a 2018 post on the couple's blog, Gates Notes, Bill describes what the day-to-day life of that society was like and why it was so important to him: “Some see Melinda as the heart of the foundation, the emotional side. . But in the same way that she knows that I am more emotional than many believe, I know that she is more analytical than everyone sees. When I get overly excited about something, I count on her to make sure I'm being realistic. She helps me understand when I can push our team further (the same way she always did at Microsoft) and when it's time to loosen up. ”
The magnate's philanthropic side had been driven by his wife since the couple's inception, as a tribute to his mother-in-law. Gates' mother, a pioneering businesswoman who died of breast cancer six months after her son's marriage, gave Melinda a letter the day before the wedding that said: wait a lot ”. The first philanthropic initiative of the marriage was shortly after her death and with the help of Gates' father, which is why she was named after him, William Gates.
Since 2000, the foundation - which has already announced that it will continue despite the divorce - has invested billions of dollars in the fight against infectious diseases and in vaccinating children. One of the causes they supported was the eradication of wild polio in Africa, which was achieved in August 2020. As one of the most important philanthropic entities in the world, with funds of close to US $ 50,000 million, the entity donated in 2020 US $ 1.75 billion to the fight against the coronavirus. In addition, he and his friend and mogul Warren Buffett are behind the Giving Pledge initiative, which urges billionaires to commit to redistributing most of their wealth.
Their philanthropic work earned them distinctions such as the Medal of Freedom - which they received from then-President Obama in 2016 - and the Legion of Honor. Melinda was also appointed an honorary Dame of the Order of the British Empire for her service to international development. In the last decade, the philanthropist focused specifically on gender inequalities in the world. Her motto is simple: "Equity cannot wait, and no one in a position to do something about it should wait to do it."
She applies it to her life: in 2012, she allocated US $ 560 million to increase the access of women in poor countries to contraceptive methods. In 2015, she founded Pivotal Ventures, an incubator that funds "transformative ideas, people, and organizations" to advance "the social advancement of women and families in America." The following year, she pledged $ 80 million to gather information on "how women live and work around the world" to help them prosper.
At 56, Melinda Gates "is increasingly visible in shaping her foundation's strategy, solving difficult global challenges from education and poverty to contraception and health," said Forbes, who in 2020 placed her at fifth place on the list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World. In the ranking of philanthropists, she came first.
What will she do now that she "after much thinking and work" has decided to put an end to at least a part of the partnership that she formed with the creator of Microsoft for 27 years? As she herself once said, there are decisions that are easier to make when you have the money to do it, and they have $ 130 billion and the inherited conviction that it is their duty to be generous with what they received.
But it's easy to predict that, as the world's greatest philanthropist, she will devote herself to managing her share of the multimillion-dollar fortune at the helm of her foundation, while ensuring that she enjoys pleasures as simple as going for a run - she's a marathoner for years and She had passed that passion on to Bill — helping her oldest daughter with her wedding preparations, and indulging once a week, like a good Texan, a good plate of Huevos Rancheros. While your ex may make lists of pros and cons, something will surely stop happening to Melinda now that they will no longer share meetings: they will stop looking at her husband while she talks, a joke she used to draw attention to. the sexism that persists in the corporate world. From now on, inevitably, all eyes of her will be on her.
