They were partners in business and love – then came the allegations. A new book unpicks their breakup, asking: where is Melinda going next?

On 3 May, 2021, Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce after 27 years of marriage in a joint statement on Twitter: ‘We no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives,’ they wrote.

Many in the Gates universe – those who knew Bill Gates in his bachelor days, those who were guests at the wedding, and those who worked with them both at their foundation – suggest that their marriage had been troubled for some time. An uncoupling surprised few of them.

But the breakup would prove complex in ways that went far beyond assets. The couple were the twin suns around which not just the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but much of the philanthropy world, orbited.

Bill and Melinda Gates announced the end of their 27-year-long marriage in 2021 Credit: Alamy

Their coupledom was woven into the origin story of the foundation, a multimedia version of which was displayed for visitors to the Seattle campus. In 1993, young and recently engaged, they took a safari trip to Africa. Gates didn’t believe in holidays in those years but his wife-to-be forced him to take one. A photograph shows them sitting in a safari van, Gates in a black T-shirt with oversized glasses. Both are smiling. However, the gold savannah and the crystalline blue waters of Zanzibar would soon lose their allure as they encountered the region’s extreme poverty.

The level of destitution was unfathomable to two young Americans who grew up in cloistered upper-middle-class homes – especially Gates, who until then had paid little attention to the world beyond Microsoft. And in 2000, their foundation was born.

Melinda and Bill Gates on holiday in 1996 Credit: Gamma

Over the decades, they portrayed themselves as a complementary pair – he the technical maven, she the intuitive counterpoint. If Gates spoke in statistics and numbers, his wife conveyed the emotional sucker punch of seeing destitution firsthand. Each also spoke about the other in the press periodically with carefully selected tidbits. Melinda French Gates, as she is now known, talked about how she insisted that her husband and their children help with the dishes, or how he set an example for other dads by driving the children to school.

Their relationship was so important to the stability of the foundation, which had roughly 1,800 employees, and the wider nonprofit world that the duo kept their ‘couple’ image intact in the media until the moment of their divorce announcement.

On 1 January, 2020, French Gates posted on Instagram: ‘New Year’s Day will always be extra special to me – marking both a fresh year and an opportunity to celebrate being married to @thisisbillgates. Today makes 26, and I’m still marveling at just how full a heart can get. Happy anniversary to the man who keeps me dancing through life.’

By then, she had reportedly already been consulting with divorce lawyers.

When Gates and French Gates started their foundation, Gates was already one of the world’s most recognised businessmen. She, by comparison, was an enigma, partly because she guarded her private life fiercely, requesting that those in her circle not talk about her. When she gave speeches – usually on causes dear to her heart, such as the importance of educating girls – she picked low-profile settings like local clubs, schools and community colleges.

She took her first director position in 1999 when she was named to the board of Drugstore.com, an early online pharmacy. She served on the board of The Washington Post Company from 2004 to 2010. She also served for a time on the board of trustees at Duke University, her alma mater. When Gates stepped down as the chief executive of Microsoft in 2000 and trained his eyes more closely on his philanthropy, French Gates got involved too.

The couple launched their philanthropic foundation in 2000 Credit: Alamy

In time, the idea was to put them in front of different audiences, according to people involved in developing the foundation’s communication strategies. Gates was being positioned as a ‘thought leader’. The aim was to put him alongside policymakers and world leaders, and he appeared at TED conferences and the World Economic Forum in Davos.

At the same time, staffers developed a two-pronged strategy around French Gates. First, they would introduce her to a general mainstream audience. (In 2008, Fortune magazine wrote one of the first big profiles of French Gates, putting her on the cover.) The second part of the strategy was to push her as the foundation co-chair who spoke about the challenges and successes of their work in public health or education, putting a vivid and human spin on the foundation’s work while Gates remained ‘the data guy’.

It was a struggle to emerge from under Gates’s shadow. But people who worked with French Gates to build her public persona found her determined and receptive to suggestions.

She was ambitious and ‘very interested in being seen as Bill’s equal’, said one person who worked closely on building her image. She welcomed media training and run-throughs of speeches and interviews. She requested intensive briefing documents and asked a lot of questions about the material.

‘Interested in being seen as Bill’s equal’: the couple in 1999, at a press conference in Seattle Credit: AFP

Carving out a role for herself inside the foundation meant Bill Gates had to adjust as well. ‘He would walk into a meeting and to whoever is leading the meeting he says, let’s go, it’s right to 100mph,’ said a former foundation employee. ‘With Gates, there is no preamble, not much small talk, he tends to launch right in.’ With French Gates in the room, ‘the meeting pace and style had to be adjusted… Both ask questions, but Gates can rattle off questions as you’re speaking, while French Gates typically waits till the end, rather than cutting someone off.’

French Gates’s book describes her husband’s reaction when she asked to co-write the foundation’s annual letter. Gates had become used to writing it on his own. His immediate reaction was: the process has been working so well, why change it?

She held her ground. For the first two years, she wrote a section of the letter, and from 2015 on, they co-wrote it until their divorce.

Slowly, French Gates established her footing. As Gates made room for her and she became a significant presence, employees too began to adapt. The duo requested that they get the same briefing materials so that one didn’t have an information advantage over the other, but they read them separately and sent back questions, copying each other in.

The couple in 2005 after Bill received an honorary knighthood from the late Queen Credit: Alamy

French Gates also asserted herself at Cascade Asset Management, a private investment firm that managed the Gates fortune and the endowment of the foundation, and the investment team began preparing a separate, abridged set of reports for her.

She didn’t ask too many questions, but ‘behind the scenes she was trying to understand, and over the years you could see progression, where she began to find her voice’, one meeting attendee said.

And yet despite her insistence and hard work, sharing the platform with a celebrity husband could be tough. As French Gates wrote in her book, ‘I’ve been trying to find my voice as I’ve been speaking next to Bill… and that can make it hard to be heard.’

Bill Gates married Melinda French in 1994 on a golf course in Lanai. Roughly 130 guests, including colleagues from Microsoft, flew to the Hawaiian island. No reporters or photographers were allowed, but some came anyway. Gates had a security force chase them away, slapping them with no-trespass orders.

Born on 15 August, 1964, Melinda French grew up in a close-knit family and went to an all-girls Catholic prep school. She joined Microsoft in 1987, after graduating from Duke University with a degree in computer science and an MBA. She made her boss’s acquaintance when she sat next to him at a dinner.

Melinda French studied computer science and business at Duke University Credit: Hulton Archive

A few months later, they ran into each other again at the company car park. It was a Saturday afternoon and, as French Gates has previously recounted, he asked her out on a date two Fridays later. She responded that it wasn’t ‘spontaneous’ enough for her. Later that day, he called to ask if they could meet that evening: ‘Is this spontaneous enough for you?’

She rose through the ranks, working as a product manager overseeing teams developing applications like Word and eventually becoming a general manager, but she initially found it difficult to fit into the company’s culture.

‘It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point they were making and every piece of data they were debating,’ French Gates once wrote. ‘It was as if every meeting, no matter how casual, was a dress rehearsal for the strategy review with Bill.’

The pair got engaged in the spring of 1993, when she was 28 and he was 37. People who worked with Gates at the time said it was well understood that the Microsoft co-founder, consumed as he was by his company, had not factored marriage or children into his life.

In a documentary, Inside Bill’s Brain, which was released in 2019, French Gates recounted how she once entered his bedroom to find Gates writing a list of the pros and cons of marriage on his whiteboard.

In the end he decided to get married because, as he told Playboy magazine in 1994, Melinda French made him feel like it, despite all his ‘past rational thinking on the topic’.

One former Microsoft executive who spoke directly with Gates at the time said that she represented the kind of responsible, caring and warm person that ‘mapped on to his mother’.

At the TED conference in 2014, Vancouver Credit: Alamy

In the early 1990s, Gates had begun building a mansion on a five-acre parcel of land in Medina, a wealthy suburb of Seattle. He had originally conceived of the house as a man cave outfitted with hi-tech, futuristic accoutrements, as well as a trampoline room. French Gates, horrified at the thought of moving into and raising children in a showy, soulless structure, hired Thierry Despont, the famed French architect and interior designer, to dab on some homey touches.

Eventually, Gates eased into married life. Their three children – Jennifer, born in 1996; Rory, born in 1999; and Phoebe, born in 2002 – grew up in the Medina home. Seattle residents would sometimes see French Gates, a practising Catholic, during Sunday Mass, kids in tow.

Today, Jennifer is a paediatrician and a showjumper who owns breeding stables and horse farms. Married to a fellow equestrian, she operates in a rarefied circle of equestrians, including the children of other billionaires, among them Eve Jobs, daughter of Steve Jobs. Rory, a graduate of the University of Chicago, retains a much lower profile than his siblings. The youngest, Phoebe, is a recent Stanford University graduate and budding fashionista, and has considerable followers on social media.

Melinda with her daughter Phoebe in 2023

The view among some observers of the Gates marriage and its unravelling is that the couple held different notions about the meaning of a marital contract. Even though French Gates agreed to marry Gates, aware of his reservations about the institution of marriage, the two were very much in love, and her sympathisers said she genuinely believed that the fact of being married would make a difference. Those more accommodating of Gates observed that love and marriage can often mean two different things.

One former associate of the Microsoft co-founder pointed out the difference between marrying someone and committing to exclusivity in that marriage, comparing it with the arrangement Warren Buffett had with his first wife, Susan, who left him to travel and pursue a singing career but arranged for a companion for her husband. (They remained married, and ‘more than amicable’, Buffett said, until Susan’s death in 2004.)

It was hardly a sparkless or joyless marriage, according to those who observed the Gates family in private settings. There were plenty of moments of affection. Yet, he was reportedly unfaithful to her.

‘There’s a duality in Bill,’ said one person who worked closely with French Gates. ‘He loves Melinda very much and [I] don’t think he ever thought he would lose her.’ At the same time, ‘Melinda is wired to serious monogamous relationships.’

Gates’s years as a young man who liked to party and go to strip clubs were known among those in the still-small tech community of the 1980s. Hard Drive, a 1992 biography by two investigative reporters, claims that he once flew by helicopter to a chalet in the French Alps for an international sales meeting, where they partied all night. At 5am, as one of the attendees was leaving, he almost stepped on Gates, lying on top of a woman.

‘Gates’s approaches were clumsy rather than predatory,’ writes Das Credit: AP

Before his marriage, Gates was also often ‘besieged’ by women who wanted to date him, the reporters wrote. A person familiar with Gates’s interactions with women said that until he got married, there were women who hoped to catch their boss’s eye. Some wore ‘Marry me, Bill’ T-shirts to office events.

A former senior Microsoft employee recalled being told by an office assistant to Gates that he was like ‘a kid in a candy store’ in the company of women, if not restrained. In the early 1990s, Gates would sometimes hit on women at cocktail receptions arranged by a bank – including the spouses of senior bankers, recalled one person with knowledge of discussions bank executives had on the matter.

Rumours about Gates and his gallivanting have long circulated inside Microsoft, the Gates Foundation and Cascade, according to people who have worked at each. Well into his marriage, it is said that it was not unusual for Gates to flirt with women and pursue them, such as asking a Microsoft employee out to dinner while still the company’s chairman.

In 2000, Gates conducted an affair with a Microsoft employee. Nearly two decades later, in 2019, the woman informed the company’s board about the relationship, which led to an investigation by a committee.

Gates stepped down from the Microsoft board in 2020. His representative acknowledged that the affair had happened but said that it had ended ‘amicably’, and that the board’s investigation had nothing to do with Gates stepping down.

It was reported to me that Gates flirted with some of the interns at the Gates Foundation.

Then, last year, it was widely reported that he had been involved in an alleged extramarital affair with a Russian bridge player named Mila Antonova, whom he met around 2010 when she was in her 20s. The Wall Street Journal also reported that after the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein discovered the alleged affair, he appeared to use it to threaten Gates.

Bill Gates met Mila Antonova around 2010

A spokesperson for Gates told the newspaper that he met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes: ‘Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr Gates.’

Gates’s approaches were clumsy rather than predatory, according to people who knew about some of them, witnessed them firsthand, or reviewed flirtatious emails he sent to them; one labelled them ‘cringeworthy’. At least three people who knew Gates at different points in his life, from the Microsoft days to the foundation, said that he did not prey upon female employees and seek sex with them in exchange for promoting their careers.

‘Bill was far from predatory,’ said a former Microsoft executive with direct insight into his boss’s behaviour. ‘That was never his problem.’ He could be ‘charming, respectful and just fun, so you start there… I know of no real situation in which anyone got anything for sleeping with Bill.’

He appeared to enjoy the adoration that came his way, especially at conferences and events where both women and men would form a throng around him.

Gates’s diary has long been packed with back-to-back meetings. Occasionally he sought freedom from his highly choreographed days. He relished his time with Warren Buffett, especially visits to Omaha, where the two billionaires enjoyed meandering, freewheeling conversations that were in sharp contrast to his structured business life.

Buffett once observed to a friend that Gates’s visits seemed to him to be moments of respite from a tightly scheduled life. When Buffett asked Gates why he couldn’t control his life and live it in a way he wanted to, Gates would simply shrug.

‘Bill likes to have a schedule; I don’t,’ Buffett said to me in an email, putting the word ‘likes’ in bold. Buffett, who is famously conflict-averse, resigned as a trustee of the foundation the month after the divorce was announced. In June he told The Wall Street Journal: ‘The Gates Foundation has no money coming after my death.’

Some saw it as a signal to the world that his legendary friendship with Gates had cooled.

French Gates has said publicly that she wanted the marriage to work. Following the announcement of their divorce and reports of Gates’s extramarital affairs, she told the CBS anchor Gayle King that it wasn’t one thing, but rather many things that had led to the divorce – there came a point when there was ‘enough there’ that it wasn’t healthy.

Mixing with the rich and famous: French Gates with Oprah Winfrey in 2019 Credit: Getty

‘I couldn’t trust what we had [any more],’ she said, adding that there were nights when she found herself lying on the carpet, in tears, wondering how to move forward.

‘I don’t question myself now, not at all,’ she said. ‘I gave every single piece of myself to this marriage. I was committed to this marriage.’

Asked by King about a report that said Gates had multiple affairs, she responded: ‘Those are questions Bill needs to answer.’

When asked why Gates continued to meet with Epstein, French Gates once again said: ‘Those are [questions] for Bill to answer.’

French Gates has said that her ex-husband’s relationship with Epstein contributed to their divorce. She had met Epstein once, in 2013. On 20 September, the couple were in New York to receive an award, and went for dinner at Epstein’s residence – a seven-storey mansion in Manhattan.

French Gates is said to have later told friends she was furious that her then husband would not cut off ties with Epstein. Since the divorce, she has also spoken publicly about her disgust for Epstein, calling him ‘abhorrent’ and evil personified.

Epstein and Gates at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2011 Credit: New York Times

In 2022, she spoke at an event where she said she had taken the psychotherapist Esther Perel’s masterclass on relational intelligence. It taught her, she said, to think about power in a relationship, and how to share that collaboratively.

‘She’s been exceptionally transparent about her marriage,’ said an acquaintance of French Gates. ‘Melinda does nothing that isn’t intentional. It had been coming for a long time.’

Not long after French Gates’s interview with Gayle King, Gates did one of his own with Savannah Guthrie on NBC. He didn’t state clearly whether he had had an affair, but admitted that he had ‘made mistakes’.

Elsewhere, Gates has insisted that it was a great marriage from his point of view, and that he wouldn’t have chosen to marry anyone else.

The divorce of Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates was one of the most expensive in history. At the time Gates had a reported net worth of $130 billion. There was no prenup.

Their final divorce order, filed in a Seattle court, had no details on the agreement they reached but Gates had begun transferring assets to her soon after their divorce announcement – billions of dollars’ worth of shares in companies like AutoNation, Deere, and Canadian National, according to regulatory filings reported by Bloomberg.

According to Forbes, her current net worth is $10.8 billion.

French Gates reportedly dissolved her marriage in part because of her husband’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein Credit: Corbis News

When the divorce was announced, the foundation had said that its two co-chairs would continue to work together, with the understanding that if they couldn’t get along within or after a two-year trial period, French Gates would leave, and her ex-husband would give her funds to pursue her own philanthropy.

They maintained a professional relationship, working together to guide the foundation, a person close to her said, but French Gates found it challenging at times.

Then earlier this year she cut ties with the foundation completely. Writing on social media, French Gates said that in leaving she was being given ‘an additional’ $12.5 billion – an amount of money that would give her enormous heft in carrying out her mission.

As of May 2024, there were discussions underway about how those billions would be used, and whether the money would all be directed through Pivotal Ventures, the investment and advocacy firm that she started in 2015, focused on, among other things, gender equality.

Today, Pivotal operates out of an airy office suffused with light, nestled in a Seattle suburb, with a lot of ‘collaborative’ spaces, wood and fabric touches, and a swanky kitchen. Among the companies in its portfolio are Tia, which offers birth control and sexual health advice, and Ellevest, which offers women investing and financial planning services.

French Gates has acknowledged that her organisation is yet to garner the attention it deserves Credit: Getty

A consultant who studied Pivotal’s investment strategy said the firm, despite having virtually no track record, expects to have greater credibility and better investment opportunities come its way by promoting French Gates’s name. ‘Melinda’s name being attached to it carries a cachet,’ the consultant said.

French Gates and her team have focused on the same high-visibility media strategy that the Gates Foundation employed. In 2020, she called upon the Biden White House to appoint a ‘care-giving tsar’, an effort to transform childcare. And the following year, after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, French Gates came out strongly in favour of abortion rights.

In many ways Pivotal became French Gates’s launch vehicle as she claimed for herself a public role. Communications professionals were tasked with shaping, sustaining and burnishing her brand as separate and distinct not only from her husband’s, but also from the foundation.

Elizabeth Dale, a professor at Seattle University who teaches nonprofit leadership, said Pivotal’s impact has been hard to assess. ‘Is Pivotal making a difference on the ground yet? It’s been eight years,’ Dale told me in 2023. The firm hasn’t got the kind of attention one would expect given French Gates’s star power, she said. ‘Outside the gender space, I don’t think a lot of people have heard about it.’

French Gates remains undeterred. She has used the press and other online platforms to get her message out, from writing opinion articles to teaching a masterclass on ‘impactful giving’. She considers herself a medium through which the experiences of other women can be told, and a powerful voice that tells women they can do anything.

It’s the voice she used in 2018, when she penned a missive about the importance of computer science education for girls and women. The essay was titled: ‘The Next Bill Gates Won’t Look Like The Last One.’