A Look at the Surprising Aftermath of Bill and Melinda Gates’ Divorce

Melinda Gates on “Unbelievably Painful” Split From Bill Gates

There’s no such thing as a billion-dollar divorce that slips under the radar—let alone a $124 billion divorce.

And the May 3, 2021, announcement that Bill Gates and Melinda Gates were ending their marriage after 27 years came as a shock regardless, the Microsoft cofounder and his partner in global philanthropy innocuously chugging along all that time, their Seattle-area home base a 66,000-square-foot mega-mansion with its own beach on the shore of Lake Washington.

Though there’s no such thing as too much space at times.

“Working from home—that was a piece that I think we hadn’t really individually prepared for quite as much,” Melinda told The New York Times in October 2020, mid-pandemic.

“The odd thing about COVID is that it gave me the privacy to do what I needed to do,” Melinda reflected to Fortune in the fall of 2022. “It’s unbelievably painful, in innumerable ways, but I had the privacy to get through it.”

Among the immediate questions in the wake of the split news: What was to become of their eponymous foundation, which since 2000 had dispersed $53.8 billion to public health and development initiatives, including $20 billion of the couple’s own Microsoft stock? And what about all their money in general, since one of the first behind-the-scenes details to come out about the parents of three was that they had no prenuptial agreement?

Bill—who started Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, when the idea of personal computers in every home was still science fiction—met Melinda French on the job in 1987, about four months after she joined Microsoft, the only woman in the company’s 10-person MBA recruitment class that year.

The high school valedictorian and Duke University grad, whose father brought home an Apple II when she was 14, sparking her interest in programming, sat in one of only two open seats at a trade fair dinner in New York and Bill arrived and took the other chair. Melinda later said of the CEO that he “was funnier than I expected him to be.”

Some months went by before Bill first asked her out, taking the opportunity when they bumped into each other (not literally) in the parking lot on a Saturday. “Everybody seemed to work on a Saturday at Microsoft,” Melinda explained on the Jan. 20, 2021, episode of the What’s Her Story With Sam & Amy podcast. But he suggested two weeks from Friday, and she informed him that wasn’t spontaneous enough for her, that she had no idea what she’d be up to that far ahead.

He got her number (and the message) and called to see if she was available for a drink that night, after the various meetings on his schedule.

Melinda didn’t share the identity of that particular confidante, but in 1997 Bill told TIME that he consulted his ex-girlfriend and fellow tech wiz Ann Winblad before popping the question.

“When I was off on my own thinking about marrying Melinda, I called Ann and asked for her approval,” he shared. Ann told the magazine, “I said she’d be a good match for him because she had intellectual stamina.”

Bill and Melinda got engaged in 1993 and, having already talked about starting a foundation, married in Hawaii on Jan. 1, 1994. Willie Nelson performed at the nuptials.

Meanwhile, Bill made no secret of the fact that he and Ann, who had traveled to Brazil, Central Africa and other far-flung locations together as a couple before breaking up in 1987, continued to enjoy their tradition of annual getaways—a long weekend every spring at her beach cottage in North Carolina—with Melinda’s understanding. 

“We can play putt-putt while discussing biotechnology,” Bill told TIME. (A source told the New York Post in the wake of the Gates divorce filing that Ann married detective Alex Kline, brother of actor Kevin Kline.)

So, that wasn’t very normal, but what is when your husband is busily running one of the most successful and universally renowned companies of all time? Even their massive house, which Bill had started building when he was a bachelor, made Melinda a little uneasy at first, mainly because it was a life decision he had spearheaded without her.

“I didn’t particularly want to move into that house,” she admitted in her book. “In fact, I didn’t feel like Bill and I were on the same page of what we wanted, and we had little time to discuss it. So in the middle of all that, I think I had a crisis of self. Who do I want to be in this marriage. And it pushed me to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do.”

Melinda recalled in the book how “shocked” Bill was when she told him during her first pregnancy that, after nine years of rising through the ranks at Microsoft, she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom (not least because he wasn’t going to be slowing down anytime soon). She was well aware they were extremely lucky to not need her income, so she seized the opportunity, knowing how much it had meant to her having her mom around when she was growing up.

Daughter Jennifer was born in April 1996, followed by son Rory in May 1999 and daughter Phoebe in September 2002.

Melinda said on What’s Her Story that she and Bill also discussed their views on family right away. “We absolutely discussed number of children,” she said. “It was imperative to me that whoever was going to be my partner in life wanted to have children and would be committed to it.”

Still, she wasn’t entirely sure just how involved of a dad Bill would end up being. And neither was he. 

“I used to think I wouldn’t be all that interested in the baby until she was two or so and could talk,” Bill told TIME when Jennifer was about 7 months old. “But I’m totally into it now. She’s just started to say ‘ba-ba’ and have a personality.”

Still, despite the resources at her disposal, it was important to Melinda that the household tasks be split as equitably as was feasible between her and Bill. In her book, Melinda admitted to being pleasantly surprised when her husband offered to take on some of the driving when Jennifer started kindergarten at a school that was at least 30 minutes away from their house. 

“It’ll give me time to talk with Jen,” he told his wife. So he made the drive twice a week, to the school and then back past the house toward Microsoft, which was in the opposite direction.

“About three weeks in,” Melinda wrote, “on my days, I started noticing a lot of dads dropping kids off in the classroom. So I went up to one of the moms and said, ‘Hey, what’s up? There are a lot of dads here.’ She said, ‘When we saw Bill driving, we went home and said to our husbands, ‘Bill Gates is driving his child to school; you can, too.'”

Right up until the end of their marriage, who-does-what-and-when remained a hot topic in the Gates house.

Asked what was the last thing she and Bill argued about, Melinda told podcast hosts Samantha Ettus and Amy Nelson, “Oh, gosh…probably time. Who is going to spend time on what? That seems to be our commodity that we don’t have enough of.”

The school commute story became a go-to anecdote, but even that was a rare peek behind the curtain for Melinda, who for the duration of her personal and professional partnership with Bill preferred to keep the spotlight on their foundation’s accomplishments.

Other than a bombshell revelation in the March 2009 issue of Vogue that, while the first family of Windows didn’t buy their kids iPhones or iPods, sometimes she looked at her friends and said, “Ooh, I wouldn’t mind having that iPhone,” Melinda purposely stayed a very private person—keeping the focus on life experience and not her life when she’s on the speaking circuit, writing articles or sitting down for interviews.

Melinda told CBS News’ Gayle King in March 2022 that it was “not one thing, it was many things” that led to their divorce. But Bill having “meetings with Jeffrey Epstein” did bother her.

“I also met Jeffrey Epstein exactly one time,” Melinda added. “Yes, because I wanted to see who this man was. And I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards. So you know, my heart breaks for these young women because that’s how I felt, and here I’m an older woman. My god, I feel terrible for those young women. It’s awful.”

His admitted affair with a Microsoft staffer was another thing, Melinda explaining to Gayle that there “came a point in time where there was enough there that I realized it just wasn’t healthy, and I couldn’t trust what we had.”

And despite the nonchalance Bill evinced decades ago when speaking of his enduring friendship with Ann Winblad, a source told People in May 2021 that their bond took its toll on his relationship with Melinda.

And still, his signature was on the January 2013 newsletter, though it was sent out along with a supplementary article by Melinda.

At the same time, Bill was historically content to chart his own course as he saw fit. He stepped down as CEO of Microsoft in 2000, becoming chief software architect and staying on as chairman of the board of directors. In 2008 he moved into a part-time role, wanting to focus most of his energies on the foundation. He remained chairman of the board until 2014.

He left the board entirely in March of 2020—a planned exit, his rep said, but the Wall Street Journal reported that at the time of his departure the board was also in the middle of an investigation into a past relationship Bill had with a Microsoft employee.

“Microsoft received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to E! News at the time. “A committee of the Board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm, to conduct a thorough investigation. Throughout the investigation, Microsoft provided extensive support to the employee who raised the concern.”

People familiar with the matter told the WSJ that the Microsoft cofounder resigned from the board before the investigation was complete. 

Bill’s spokeswoman told the publication, “There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably.” Moreover, his “decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter. In fact, he had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier.”

He also expressed zero regrets about the “great marriage” he shared at one point with his ex-wife, saying he’d “marry Melinda all over again.”

Last year Bill went public with girlfriend Paula Hurd, the widow of Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, who died in October 2019. But he and Melinda are forever joined beyond the foundation, becoming grandparents in March 2023 when daughter Jennifer welcomed her first child with husband Nayel Nassar, and reuniting for a family dinner to celebrate Phoebe’s 21st birthday that September. Melinda and Phoebe also hit a few events together, including the Michael Kors show at New York Fashion Week and the Clooney-hosted Albie Awards.

Jennifer, who graduated from medical school in May, shared in June that she and Nayel are expecting baby No. 2.

Talking to Gayle King on CBS Mornings in 2022, Melinda acknowledged the “painful stuff” divorces are made of.

“At the end of the day, though,” she added, “I started on this journey of healing, and I feel like I’m starting to get to the other side. And I do feel like I’m turning a page in the chapter now…I’m actually really excited about what’s to come and life ahead for me.”

And there’s nothing wrong with appreciating what was. Read on for more famous couples who split up after many years of marriage: