Bill Gates has separated from his wife after 27 years of marriage. Their divorce could be the most expensive in history

On May 3, 2021 Bill and Melinda Gates announced that they are breaking up after 27 years of marriage. Their family was considered exemplary: for all these years there was not even a hint of scandals or quarrels, they raised children together and did charity work. The story of a marriage, which is likely to end in the most expensive divorce in history, is in the material of Lenta.ru.

On Monday, May 3, the same post appeared on the Twitter accounts of Bill and Melinda Gates:

The message became a bolt from the blue. If the couple had problems, information about it was not leaked to the media. However, publications around the world were much more interested not in the reason for the breakup, but in how fabulously rich spouses were going to share the money.

Forbes magazine estimates the fortune of Bill Gates at $ 130 billion, the businessman ranks fourth in the ranking of the richest living people.

After the divorce, which is already tipped the title of the most expensive in history, the man who stood at the origins of Microsoft, and then became the largest philanthropist in the world, can go down in the ranking much lower. And his wife Melinda Gates – perhaps the most influential philanthropist in the world – is, on the contrary, to rise. It is unlikely that 34 years ago, when they had an affair, they expected it to end so sadly and loudly.

Unlike Bill Gates’ family, Melinda’s parents could not boast of special wealth. To send the children to college, her father, who was involved in the development of aerospace systems, moonlighted by renting out real estate. It is possible that this is what predetermined the fate of his daughter. 14-year-old Melinda helped him keep records on an Apple computer, got involved and after school decided to study as a programmer.

In 1986, she graduated from university with two degrees – in computer engineering and an MBA – and immediately took a job at Microsoft. The company had just listed its shares on the stock exchange, but its main achievements were ahead. Then almost no one heard of Windows, and Microsoft Office simply did not exist. Melinda admitted to an employee she knew that she had set two goals for herself: to run a marathon and to get her assigned as a product manager in the department that develops Word for MS-DOS. She managed to achieve both.

Over time, in addition to Word, Melinda was given the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia, the Expedia travel site and several other products, including the ill-fated Microsoft Bob, an experimental user interface reminiscent of a computer game. Controlling the system required walking through rooms, interacting with animated characters, and using objects. For example, a pen and paper on a drawn table opened a text editor, and a clock opened a diary.

“We hoped it would make Windows more user-friendly,” Melinda explained. “But we were in for a fiasco. Critics killed ‘Bob’. Although almost no one used the product itself, its remnants plagued Windows users for a long time. The animated characters turned into Skrepysh and other Office assistants, and one of them, a dog named Rover, appeared when searching in Windows XP’s Explorer.

Spontaneous romance

Melinda met Bill Gates in 1987 at a conference in New York. After returning, he approached her in the parking lot and said, “You know, I thought maybe we should go out on a date? For example, in two weeks. ” Melinda claims that she laughed and replied that she would not make such long-term plans. “It’s not spontaneous enough for me,” she said. – Ask more to the point. Two hours later, Gates called back and offered to go on a date right now. “So are you spontaneous enough?” – he asked.

“It turned out that we have a lot in common,” Melinda later recalled. “We both loved puzzles, so we started having puzzle competitions and had fun with math games. I think he was intrigued when I beat him in a math game and won the very first time we played Cluedo, a board game where you have to figure out who killed whom, in which room and with what weapon. ”

According to former Microsoft employee Ruth Warren, in the presence of Melinda, Gates behaved much more fun than usual. Once at a corporate party, Melinda persuaded Bill to jump across the table. Although the Microsoft founder wore a tuxedo and slippery leather shoes, he agreed. Then Melinda began to put burning candles on the table and demand that Bill jump again. There were more and more candles, it became more and more difficult to jump, and as a result, the whole company laughed, including Gates himself.

At first, their relationship was not serious. “She dated other men, and I had Microsoft,” Gates explained many years later in the documentary series Inside Bill’s Brain. In reality, the business was not limited to work – he had affairs with other Microsoft employees.

As for Melinda, even at the university she changed boyfriends much less often than other students. And she chose them for a reason: one of her suitors was billionaire William Wrigley Jr., the great-grandson of the founder of Wrigley’s company, which produces Wrigley’s Spearmint chewing gum.

A few years later, Gates began to think about marriage. Before proposing to Melinda, he made a list of pros and cons on a piece of paper. There were more “pros.” The wedding took place on January 1, 1994 in Hawaii. Famous country musician Willie Nelson sang in front of the newlyweds and the guests were entertained with fireworks. According to rumors, the celebration cost a million dollars.

First difficulties

Melinda became pregnant with her first child about two years after the wedding. She immediately told her husband that she was not going to work after giving birth. At first, Bill was dumbfounded, he asked his wife several times if she was sure of her decision: Melinda adored work to a shiver and at that time was the only woman in the top management of Microsoft. However, she explained that she did not want him to leave work earlier, but at the same time, without his help, she would not be able to combine shock work in the office and high-quality upbringing of children. Of course, there was no question of money.

Nevertheless, after being fired and having children, Melinda faced an identity crisis and suffered from loneliness. In her book “The moment of take-off. The stories of women who challenged patriarchal society,” she writes:

“Melinda was especially enraged by one case: she was putting things in the trunk of a car, and the children, for some reason, quarreled among themselves. Instead of helping her with at least something — taking over the gathering or showdown between the children — Gates sat, buried in a book about Winston Churchill. She was so angry that she remembered it to him for many years.”

“Bill often said in interviews that I was his partner in all endeavors. This is true, but I have not always been an equal partner. He had to learn to give in to be equal to me, and I had to learn to reach his level, ”complained Melinda. At work in their common charitable foundation, she had to do even more than her husband to be considered at least roughly his equal. Despite this, there were still people who spoke to her in words, and looked only at her husband, believing that it was he who made the decisions.”

Warren Buffett, an American billionaire and a close family friend, once said in an interview with Fortune magazine: “Bill, of course, is damn smart, but Melinda sees and understands much better what is happening in general.”

Charity

A year before the wedding, Bill and Melinda visited Zanzibar. “What we saw there made an indelible impression on us,” Melinda recalled. – I remember leaving one city and seeing a pregnant woman: one child in her stomach, another in her arms, and on her head she carries a bundle of brushwood. She obviously walked a considerable distance, and without shoes, despite the fact that the men I saw walked in slippers, with cigarettes in their teeth and without brushwood or children. We drove, I saw more and more women with heavy burdens and more and more wanted to know how they live. ”

Melinda claims that it was then that they first thought about helping people in poor countries. To do this, in 2000, they opened the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has since become the largest private foundation in the world. Since Bill remained the head of Microsoft, his wife took the lead, especially at first.

From 1994 to 2018, Bill and Melinda Gates donated more than $ 36 billion to charity. The main investments went to the fight against malaria, polio, HIV and other infectious diseases that kill millions of people in third world countries, but are ignored by pharmaceutical companies because of their unprofitability.

The largest donations were received by the international organization GAVI, which works to increase the availability of childhood vaccinations in poor countries, the World Health Organization and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Bill and Melinda Gates have repeatedly warned about the threat of a pandemic, and in 2020 they threw all their strength into the fight against the spread of COVID-19. Their foundation spent $ 1.75 billion on this. Some of the money went to fund the development of Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines.

In 2016, Melinda Gates received the highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her contributions to health and poverty alleviation.

Family idyll

Over time, the couple managed to create a real idyll. Already in 2001, when Melinda complained to her husband that traveling with her daughter to school was taking too long, to her surprise, Bill agreed to take the child back and forth twice a week and said that this would give him more time to communicate with her.

The consequences of this decision were comic: soon fathers began to take children to the same kindergarten en masse. When Melinda asked one of the mothers what was the matter, she replied: “When we saw Bill driving, we returned home and told our husbands:” If Bill Gates takes the child to school, you can do it even more. ”

Bill Gates, Miranda and their three children — Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe —  seemed like a model family. Publications around the world wrote about the unusually modest parenting style of billionaires: for example, after dinner, the whole family washes the dishes together, and other household chores are fairly distributed among all family members.

The consequences of this decision were comic: soon fathers began to take children to the same kindergarten en masse. When Melinda asked one of the mothers what was the matter, she replied: “When we saw Bill driving, we returned home and told our husbands:” If Bill Gates takes the child to school, you can do it even more. ”

Bill Gates, Miranda and their three children – Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe – seemed like a model family. Publications around the world wrote about the unusually modest parenting style of billionaires: for example, after dinner, the whole family washes the dishes together, and other household chores are fairly distributed among all family members.