Bill and Melinda Gates’ billion-dollar split
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, are to split. Here’s a look at their love story and what’s at stake in their separation
WHEN they got married, a simple wedding gift from her parents would become one of her most treasured possessions. It was a sculpture of two little birds sitting side by side staring at the horizon, and she put it in the front garden of their home so she could see it whenever she came and went.
“Those birds are still in front of our house,” she wrote in 2018 in her and her husband’s annual newsletter. “I think of it all the time because fundamentally Bill and I are looking in the same direction.”
How poignant those words are now – and how bittersweet that sculpture must be. After 27 years of marriage, three kids, billions of dollars and decades of philanthropy, Bill and Melinda Gates are no longer looking in the same direction. And it’s no exaggeration to say their split has left the world gobsmacked.
In a world where high-flying couples get divorced all the time, the Gateses seemed stable and “normal”, a slightly geeky couple who cared more about the greater good of the planet and its people than a life of glitz and glamour.
“It’s not fair that we have so much wealth when billions of others have so little,” Melinda once said.
Since their 1994 wedding they’ve donated at least $40 billion ($580bn) to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds IT education in the US and healthcare and poverty initiatives around the world, including large-scale projects to fight HIV and malaria.
When Covid-19 began to ravage the globe, the Gates Foundation was one of the earliest and largest funders of research into a vaccine.
They seemed solid to the end – two people who looked like the couple next door, with generous hearts and deep pockets. And now, although Bill (65) and Melinda (56) have pledged to continue working together on the foundation, the love story of one of richest couples on Earth is over.
Melinda is the one who filed for divorce, stating in court documents that the marriage was “irretrievably broken”.
In the days after the divorce announcement, it emerged that she’d in fact started consulting divorce lawyers in October 2019 but the couple decided to wait until their youngest child, Phoebe, had turned 18 before they formally announced the split.
The Gateses then went on Twitter with a statement no one saw coming. “After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we’ve made the decision to end our marriage.
“We’ve built a foundation all over the world to enable people to lead healthy, productive lives and we continue to share a belief in that mission. [But we] no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives”.
The tweet received more than 140 000 likes and was retweeted 15 000 times as people grappled to get to grips with it.
Just what the hell had happened?
THEIR love story began in 1987 when Melinda French joined Bill’s Microsoft company as a product manager. “I was definitely attracted to his brilliant mind, but beyond that, his curiosity,” Melinda told Fortune magazine. “And he has a huge sense of fun. I love that wry side of him.”
Bill was attracted to her mind and independence but things were casual in the beginning. “She had other boyfriends and I had Microsoft,” he said. “We were like, ‘Hey, we aren’t really serious about each other, are we? We aren’t going to demand each other’s time.’ ”
But after a year things changed. “Sort of to our surprise – certainly to my surprise – we said, ‘Hey, I love you,’ ” Bill said. “And she said she loved me and it was like, ‘Wow, now what’s going to happen?’ ”
One day Melinda walked into Bill’s bedroom and found him making a list of pros and cons of getting married on a whiteboard. And although it’s not clear what those were, clearly the pros won: in 1993 he popped the question – but not before asking for the blessing of ex-girlfriend Ann Winblad, a woman he’s still close to.
“When I was off on my own thinking of marrying Melinda, I called Ann and asked for her approval,” Bill said.
Ann approved of Melinda because she had the intellectual stamina to keep up with Bill. He and Melinda bonded over a shared love of puzzles and maths games, Melinda once recalled.
“I think he got intrigued when I beat him at a math game and won the first time we played Cluedo,” she said.
‘WE NO LONGER BELIEVE WE CAN GROW TOGETHER AS A COUPLE IN THIS NEXT PHASE OF OUR LIVES’
“He urged me to read The Great Gatsby, his favourite novel, and I had – twice. Maybe that’s when he knew he’d met his match. When we got engaged, someone asked Bill, ‘How does Melinda make you feel?’ and he said, ‘Amazingly she makes me feel like getting married’.”
The wedding took place in spectacular fashion at the Manele Bay Hotel in Maui, Hawaii, in 1994. They said their vows on the 12th hole of the resort’s golf course in a celebration that reportedly cost $1 million (then R3,4m).
To keep things as private as possible, Bill booked out all the rooms in the hotel and all the helicopters on the island “to prevent unwanted visitors flying over”, Forbes Magazine reported.
And so their lives together began. At first they continued to work together at Microsoft as well as build their philanthropic endeavours – but when Melinda fell pregnant with first child Jennifer (now 25), she told Bill she was giving up work.
“He was stunned,” she recalled in an interview. “He said, ‘What do you mean, you’re not going back?’ I said, ‘ We’re lucky enough not to need my income. So this is about how we want to raise a family. You’re not going to downshift at work and I don’t see how I can put in the hours I need to do a great job at work and raise a family at the same time.”
Two more kids followed, Rory (now 21) and Phoebe, and their parents worked hard to give them a normal upbringing. Cellphones were banned until they were 14, everyone did the dishes, and reading books was encouraged. Bill regularly took the kids to school so he could spend quality time with them.
He and Melinda also stipulated that the kids would each inherit about $10m (R14,5m) of the Gates fortune – the rest will go to charitable causes.
“We want to strike a balance where they have the freedom to do anything but not a lot of money showered on them so they could go out and do nothing,” Bill said.
YET for all their family values and shared interests, there have been hints of Melinda’s unhappiness and frustration over the years. She’s said in the past that their marriage could be really tough, revealing how Bill regularly worked 16-hour days and often found it difficult to make time for his family.
“Believe me, I can remember days that were so incredibly hard in our marriage where you thought, ‘Can I do this?’ ” she told Britain’s Sunday Times in 2019 in an interview to mark their 25th anniversary. She recalled how she felt terribly alone after having Jennifer and she had to work hard to keep their marriage afloat.
“Bill was CEO of Microsoft and he was beyond busy – everyone wanted him. And I was thinking, ‘Okay, maybe he wanted to have kids in theory, but not in reality’.”
Melinda always took on the lion’s share of parenting while Bill threw himself increasingly into work, a family insider says.
John Gottman, author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, says the fact the couple’s three children are older now might have something to do with the split.
When couples are no longer raising children together, they might discover they have less in common than they used to. “It’s a time when they reassess what the relationship holds for each of them as individuals,” he adds. “My guess is that in a lot of ways, they led parallel lives. They’re so busy and they’re both powerful intellects independently.”
Billionaire businessman Warren Buffet, a close friend of the Gateses, told Fortune that Bill is “smart as hell, obviously”, but “in terms of seeing the whole picture, Melinda is smarter”.
The family source agrees. “Melinda has an amazing capacity to give. She can diversify whereas Bill tends to focus very much on one thing. And over the years, that thing has been work.”
Scott Stanley, co-director of the Centre for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, says uber-wealthy couples like the Gateses don’t have money to consider when they decide to split.
“Those with no financial constraints actually have fewer constraints on staying together if they hit a patch where they’re less happy and where dedication wanes,” he says. “When people have loads of alternatives, including financially, they’re going to find it easier to let go when the dis
tance has grown too large.”
In the days after the split, there has also been speculation about Bill’s former girlfriend. Ann (70), a formidable businesswoman with more than 40 years experience in the IT industry, started her first company in 1976. She and Bill dated for three years before he met Melinda, eventually splitting because she was ready for marriage and he wasn’t.
But they remain close. Bill even had an arrangement with Melinda where he and Ann would go on holiday every spring to her beach cottage in North Carolina where they reportedly ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach.
“We can play putt-putt while discussing biotechnology,” Bill once said.
T“We share our thoughts about the world and ourselves,” Ann said. “And we marvel about how, as two young overachievers, we began a great adventure on the fringes of a little-known industry and it landed us at the centre of an amazing universe.”
HAT industry has also, of course, made the Gateses richer than it’s possible to fathom.
Between their personal fortune and charitable foundation, the amount of money they control is roughly equal to the annual GDP of Kazakhstan.
Bill is worth a staggering $124bn (R1,7 trillion), making him the fourth-richest person on Earth after Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bernard Arnault.
The Gateses don’t have a prenuptial agreement but they do have a separation agreement that dictates what each partner is entitled to.
Bill holds around $26bn (R377bn) in Microsoft stock and the family own more farmland in the US than anyone else. Their main home, nicknamed Xanadu 2.0, is worth a cool $130m (R1,8bn).
Situated overlooking Lake Washington in the city of Medina, the house is just outside Seattle where the Gates Foundation has its headquarters.
It has seven bedrooms, 18 bathrooms, an Art Deco home cinema with seating for 20, a beach with sand imported from the Caribbean and an indoor-outdoor pool with an ancient fossil imprint of a palm frond behind the diving board.
While splitting the assets might be a complicated, drawn-out process, it doesn’t look as if things will get ugly.
Just a day after announcing their split, Bill transferred more than $1,8bn (R26bn) in shares to Melinda. The shares are in Cascade Investment, a holding company Bill created with the proceeds of Microsoft Corp, stock sales and dividends.
Melissa also has ventures of her own. In 2015 she launched Pivotal Ventures, an investment company that promotes women’s empowerment.
If the couple do split the fortune equally, Melinda will be worth $65,2bn (R946bn), which would be $5,4m (R79m) more than MacKenzie Scott got when she and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos divorced in 2019.
Yet for all the money in the world, nothing can soften the devastating blow of a family falling apart.
“It’s been a challenging stretch of time for our whole family,” Jennifer, a talented equestrian and medical student, said on Instagram.
“I’m still learning how to best support my own process and emotions as well as family members at this time and am grateful for the space to do so.”
‘I REMEMBER DAYS THAT WERE SO HARD IN OUR MARRIAGE WHERE YOU THOUGHT, “CAN I DO THIS?” ’