Bill and Melinda Gates getting divorced

I think it is quite possible to just get bored with one another. An affair is not a prerequisite for a divorce although if one is bored, there is likely more chance of an affair.

As long as they are honest with one another, then?? Of course, it is more complicated when they have such a large estate to divide but then they have the money to pay for a huge team of legal beagles..........

WRT the Epstein connection, what was it in relationship to. I get he is a bad egg and if Mr Gates was involved with young girls then ugh...........but he just does not come across that way. Maybe it was only an arm's length one time association?
 
Further details on the split. Melinda has been planning it for years.

Apparently Bill vacations each year alone with a former girlfriend with Melinda’s knowledge. :watch:

apple.news

Melinda Gates ‘had been planning divorce from Bill for years’ — The Times and The Sunday Times

Melinda Gates has been working with divorce lawyers for two years amid growing concerns over her husband’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, it was reported last night. The couple, worth about $130 billion, announced last week that their 27-year marriage was...
apple.news apple.news
 
I had assumed that Gates was meeting with Epstein to try to get money out of him and not to get young girls out of him. There were never any pictures of him at parties or reports of him taking jet rides with Epstein. That said, to associate with him at all when he was a known sex trafficker and procure of young girls is not just a lapse in judgment but shows a lack of morals IMO.
 
Apparently, Bill Gates is just another guy who couldn't keep it in his pants.

www.bostonglobe.com

Microsoft investigated Gates before he left board, according to report - The Boston Globe

Board members at Microsoft Corp. made a decision in 2020 that it wasn’t appropriate for its co-founder Bill Gates to continue sitting on its board as they investigated the billionaire’s prior romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee that was deemed inappropriate, according to a...
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com
 
BittyBug said:
Apparently, Bill Gates is just another guy who couldn't keep it in his pants.

www.bostonglobe.com

Microsoft investigated Gates before he left board, according to report - The Boston Globe

Board members at Microsoft Corp. made a decision in 2020 that it wasn’t appropriate for its co-founder Bill Gates to continue sitting on its board as they investigated the billionaire’s prior romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee that was deemed inappropriate, according to a...
www.bostonglobe.com www.bostonglobe.com
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Looks like the rumours I heard are being confirmed now.
 
How disappointing if found to be true. Still, he and his wife have contributed significantly to charities (not that it would lessen the nature of his actions if found true).
 
Winnipeg said:
How disappointing if found to be true. Still, he and his wife have contributed significantly to charities (not that it would lessen the nature of his actions if found true).
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Even their charitable contributions are not without controversy though. In particular, they spent a lot of money in Education where they didn't listen to educators and ended up wasting it because none of their ideas panned out. An outcome that was painfully obvious to anyone with any expertise in education. Their focus on eliminating certain diseases via vaccination is also controversial because it means they focus on areas where eradication is easiest and possible and not on the areas of most need. There are also issues about them having outsized power in decision-making because they supply outsized money.

Also, the type of foundation they have is one where they get immense tax benefits without actually having to spend a lot of money. It's some weird rule where they put money into the foundation, say they will use it for charity eventually, but don't actually have to use it for charity and still get to declare it as charity income.
 
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MacMadame said:
Even their charitable contributions are not without controversy though. In particular, they spent a lot of money in Education where they didn't listen to educators and ended up wasting it because none of their ideas panned out.
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They are still spending money on education and I haven't found it to be true that they don't listen. Certainly people from the foundation came into all this with a lot of ideas that haven't panned out, but IME, they are quite willing to accept data that says they are wrong and also to accept data that says that faculty are right. Anecdotal opinions, not so much. But they are way more adaptable than a lot of other organizations that have ideas about education and want to spend money to force bribe colleges into doing their bidding and seem, at least at the level I have seen, to be genuinely interested in improving education.

Full disclosure: my school has gotten quite a bit of money from the Gates Foundation for different programs.
 
The stories about Bill Gates being a womanizer are surprising because I've seen so many interviews and a more awkward person you cannot find.
 
clairecloutier said:
Yup. More in The New York Times:

www.nytimes.com

Long Before Divorce, Bill Gates Had Reputation for Questionable Behavior (Published 2021)

Melinda French Gates voiced concerns about her husband’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and a harassment claim against his money manager. He also had an affair with an employee.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
Click to expand...

I guess Bill making that transfer of $$$$ stocks into Melinda's account wasn't enough to discourage this information being leaked. In addition to the information about the Jeffrey Epstein connection. Sounds like Melinda has decided to play hardball.
 
MacMadame said:
Also, the type of foundation they have is one where they get immense tax benefits without actually having to spend a lot of money. It's some weird rule where they put money into the foundation, say they will use it for charity eventually, but don't actually have to use it for charity and still get to declare it as charity income.
Click to expand...
That's pretty much the structure of a foundation - the donors get the tax write off when they fund the foundation, not when the funds are disbursed to other charitable causes. But the money doesn't belong to the donors any longer - they don't get to spend it, they don't earn interest on it, and in order to keep foundation status, they have to be spending funds on their intended mission. BLGF is huge enough that there are certainly significant structures around how much to grant out each year, how much goes to infrastructure, and how to invest the endowment (which is probably the bulk of the Foundation).

Door-Advised Funds (DAFs) tend to be the places that are more loophole-y, as individuals park their funds in a fund managed by someone else each year, get the write off, and often there is no requirement for the funds to be disbursed on a schedule. I recently learned that there is something like $140 billion sitting in DAFs in the US because the DAF holders haven't directed their giving. Ugh.
 
genevieve said:
Door-Advised Funds (DAFs) tend to be the places that are more loophole-y, as individuals park their funds in a fund managed by someone else each year, get the write off, and often there is no requirement for the funds to be disbursed on a schedule. I recently learned that there is something like $140 billion sitting in DAFs in the US because the DAF holders haven't directed their giving. Ugh.
Click to expand...
My understanding is that the Gates Foundation is one of those.
 
MacMadame said:
My understanding is that the Gates Foundation is one of those.
Click to expand...
Changed because I looked further. TIL!

There is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which funds the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They are separate entities, and the Trust is probably the loophole you're referring to. The Trust's purpose is to fund the BMGF, and it probably does offer major tax advantages. Seems far more regimented than a DAF, though, and they have to file their own 990 (non-profit tax form), which is publicly accessible through Guidestar.

ETA per the 2019 990, the Trust had $6.4Bil in revenues (about half contributed, half investments), and spent $6B, $5.8B of which was granted to the BMGF. There is a rolling excess of undistributed funds that I'd need to look at more carefully to understand better, and it's not insignificant, but the Trust does not appear shady or to simply be a tax shelter without doing the charitable giving portion.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is definitely not a DAF.
 
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MacMadame said:
Also, the type of foundation they have is one where they get immense tax benefits without actually having to spend a lot of money. It's some weird rule where they put money into the foundation, say they will use it for charity eventually, but don't actually have to use it for charity and still get to declare it as charity income.
Click to expand...
The Foundation was also given a huge pile of billions from Warren Buffett, who decided that he'd rather have an established Foundation manage the donations than spend money on a new, parallel administrative staff. The terms were that the BMGF had to spend it all in a relative short period of time -- maybe a decade or 12 years? -- and weren't allowed to stockpile it and only spend investment income. If the BMGF didn't dig deep into its own pockets during that time, it had a very good reason. They didn't have a lot of time to pivot or create long, slow pilot programs with that much money to spend, and there was a lot of fear among people watching that such influence without knowing the long-term impact could cause huge damage.

Bill Gates' parents were local, wealthy, and socially connected, and he went to one of the toniest private schools in the area. His clubbing and dating behavior was well known in what was, certainly at the time, a very small town. His behavior while he was dating Melinda French, was engaged to Melinda French, and was married to Melinda French was widely known within the company, and due to how many people worked there, a lot of their friends and neighbors, including those not in the company who dated him. It was taken as fact at the time of their marriage that it was a term of it that he was going to spend one weekend every year with a woman who is described as his intellectual equal if not superior and who is accomplished in her own right, someone he wanted to marry, but who turned him down.

French knew what she was getting when she married him. It may have been a final straw that he was having long affairs rather than random sex and short affairs, but I'm more inclined to believe it was a combination of Epstein and the ages of their children.

I've always found it interesting that almost all of the criticism about the BMGF was focused on him -- on his greed and meglomania -- but rarely about her. It will be interesting to see if she eventually goes out on her own whether there will be retroactive blame assigned like there was to another Wife of a Bill.
 
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(intentional double post)

I just want to add that while I've lived in Seattle, I'd never heard that he didn't love her when they married, just people thinking that Cole Porter's "Always True to You in My Fashion" was apropos, and that it might get old for her. By the time he married French, at his age, it wouldn't have been unusual for him to have either been married to someone else, engaged to someone else, or have seriously wanted to marry someone else, which, as we always know, doesn't always work out the way we'd hoped. If we all stopped after our earliest choice didn't end in a long-term marriage, how many people would ever be married?

I remember standing in the passholders line at a movie theater in the U District, waiting to get into the next movie, I think sometime in the 00's or early 2010's. They came out of the previous movie, walking down the street hand in hand, smiling at each other, and having a conversation. They looked genuinely happy, and not for show; by then, they would have been married at least 15 years. It was working for them on some level pretty deep into their marriage, whatever they had negotiated between them.
 
kwanfan1818 said:
It was taken as fact at the time of their marriage that it was a term of it that he was going to spend one weekend every year with a woman who is described as his intellectual equal if not superior and who is accomplished in her own right, someone he wanted to marry, but who turned him down.
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How disappointingly common
 
jenny12 said:
Yeah, people will overlook a lot for money and power.

With all the recent stories of men in power abusing their positions, nothing would surprise me about Bill Gates.
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It doesn't surprise me intellectually. But on an emotional level, he just looks like a big dweeb who can't get a date. I know that's ridiculous and just my own biases, particularly as I know people who look like him and have a perfectly fine time dating. But biases aren't always logical.
 
He is not a nerdy guy who lived in the basement, had a great idea, and became an overnight millionaire. He comes from money, even if not billions and social connections, and he went to an elite private school. He didn't have a problem getting women to sleep with him, even before he became billg.

By the time I moved to Seattle in 1994, there were a lot of mostly male developers with questionable social skills who were hired right out of college, worked for Microsoft for five years, and were milliionaires, wealthy enough to have fancy cars and buy nice houses and have boats and go to the most expensive restaurants and weekend get-aways. Then there were Gates' Microsoft contemporaries who were much wealthier from running divisions. You really didn't have to aim for Bill Gates because his father ran the small town, and he was going to inherit it: there were plenty of wealthy fish in the sea.
 
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