‘Gigantic joy’: Melinda French Gates on her new life after divorce

This story is part of the April 12 edition of Good Weekend.See all 12 stories.

Melinda French Gates is the 10th-richest woman on the planet, or thereabouts. Her personal wealth is estimated at $US30 billion ($48 billion). How does an ordinary person even conceive of this sort of money? As I was beginning this story, I made an attempt to understand what it would be like to be dealing with wealth beyond the ken of mortal man, as she does on a daily basis.

This effort begins badly, because there are too many zeros to even enter $US30 billion into my iPhone 8 calculator. Eventually, however, I think I figure out that if I put it all into a term deposit (my main investment vehicle) at 4.55 per cent (the rate my bank is currently offering), it would earn me $US1.365 billion a year in interest alone. That’s $US3.74 million a day, or nearly $US156,000 an hour. By this reckoning, my Zoom interview with Melinda French Gates takes $US129,850 of her time. No pressure there then.

French Gates herself would never, I feel certain, consider such a calculation. Almost the first thing she does when our Sydney-New York connection clicks in is to apologise for getting me up so early. Oh, I say, embarrassed, it’s 8am – totally civilised. “But getting to the studio in the morning,” she says with concern. “Getting dressed and getting there – it’s another thing, I know.” This attitude – a kind of engaged earnestness – seems natural to her. She listens carefully to questions; she thinks hard about answers. She seems like a particularly conscientious, ordinary person, which, when you consider the average billionaires we hear about – Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, our own Gina Rinehart or Rupert Murdoch – is, in its own way, extraordinary.

This quality seems partly the result of her own personality, and partly – oddly – her nationality. Dressed in an unadorned brown suit, her thick, brown hair in smooth waves on either side of her face, she exemplifies the qualities of Americans at their best: beautiful manners, generosity, a total lack of cynicism. And as her philanthropic work shows, she also has a particularly American faith in perfectible society: she believes that the utopian dream of a shining city on a hill – beloved by New England Puritans in the 17th century, re-energised by Ronald Reagan in the 20th, and facing powerful Trump-shaped headwinds in the 21st – remains achievable, both for the United States and for the world.

For French Gates, mind you, the past five years have also involved her own private headwinds. In 2021, after much soul-searching, she ended her 27-year marriage to Bill Gates. Last year, she left the enormous and enormously influential philanthropic institution, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now simply the Gates Foundation), which she co-founded in 2000 and devoted much of her life to. She also turned 60, and became a grandmother for the second time.

“I am still in a transitional phase,” she says now. “I only left the foundation less than a year ago. The fact that I have these two little granddaughters, I didn’t expect that by this age, you know; I thought I’d be a little older! But I want people to know that in any transition you’re making – one you expect, one you don’t expect; one that’s exhilarating, one that’s scary – there are openings on the other side that are completely unexpected.” These openings can be daunting, but also filled with “gigantic joy”.

Next week, her book about this period of her life, The Next Day, is released worldwide. She wrote it, she says, because she wanted people – especially women – to know that transitions are not only about endings but opportunities. “Sometimes you need other people, like your friends, to hold out that perspective for you,” she explains. “Or you need to go to a spiritual writer, you know, and pull their book off the shelf and go, ‘OK, wait a minute. Here’s some perspective on the situation.’ ” Or you may even need Melinda French Gates, top rich-lister, top global philanthropist, and – unexpectedly – top genuine person on a Zoom call, to tell you everything’s going to be OK.

Meeting of minds

Bill Gates and Melinda French met in 1987 when she was an MBA graduate at Microsoft, and he was one of the tech wunderkinds driving the global home computer revolution. She was, as she describes in The Next Day, a hard-working, ambitious young woman in the Wild-West new world of tech. In the early 1980s, she had few examples of women succeeding – she points out that Alexis Carrington from Dynasty was one of the few women she’d ever heard of with “a role outside the home” – but her father, a poor, small-town kid who went to Stanford on a scholarship and became a space engineer on the Apollo program, always believed in her. Her relationship with Bill Gates, first at Microsoft (where she oversaw 1800 people, before leaving when her first daughter was born), then at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, seemed an equal partnership based on mutual respect and genuine shared interests.

By any judgment, the pair were a powerful double act. Within two decades, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had given away more than $US77.6  billion to help almost eradicate polio from the planet, make huge inroads into malaria and HIV treatment, and fight poverty and disease around the world. Their friend Warren Buffett once described Bill as “smart as hell”, then added, “but she is smarter”. In 2010, the three friends founded the Giving Pledge (though Melinda’s name is often omitted): an international campaign to encourage the world’s richest people to donate a majority of their wealth to charity.

Melinda French Gates in 2006 with then husband Bill, left, and Warren Buffett, who has called her “smarter” than Bill.Credit: Getty Images

Another person in this rarefied space, Laurene Powell Jobs (widow of Steve), once described French Gates’ ability to “blend deep compassion with sharp analytical thinking”, and French Gates has always been clear-eyed about the value of extreme wealth. As she wrote in a public letter about the Giving Pledge, “giving away money your family will never need is not an especially noble act”. She often characterises the kind of money she has at her disposal as some version of “ridiculous” or “absurd”.

Still, this kind of money, perhaps, can paper over a lot of cracks. It was not until a few years ago that tensions in the Gates marriage became public. There were reports (dating from years earlier) of an affair between Bill Gates and a colleague; in 2017, one of the Gates’ personal wealth managers was accused of sexual harassment, but when French Gates wanted him dismissed, Bill chose to support him. Then The New York Times published an investigation into Bill Gates’ connection to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including an ill-advised 2011 email in which Bill – who has never been linked to any of Epstein’s crimes – described Epstein’s lifestyle as “kind of intriguing, although it would not work for me”.

‘If the person says they’ll change, but they don’t, then you have to say, “Can I stay true to my values and be in a deep, intimate relationship with this person?” ’

In The Next Day, French Gates’ struggle to come to terms with such difficulties is poignant. Raised in a strongly Catholic, unusually happy family, with two brothers and a sister, a dynamic stay-at-home mother and her space-engineer father, she clearly believes in marriage. She’s also a devoted mother, and took a lot of joy from the day-to-day details of family life. But over the years, she says, the problems in her relationship led to the slow erosion of her own sense of inner integrity.

“When you enter a marriage, at least in our case, we certainly had agreed on our values, right?” she explains. “And you can think for a long time you’re living those values, but if you start to find that one partner is veering off, you have to ask yourself, ‘Well, am I veering off, too?’ And not even big things, but even people who come into your life that you think, ‘Mmm, maybe that person’s not such a great person, you know.’ ” She pauses. “You can veer off in small ways [and] they can become bigger, or maybe your partner really veers off. And so you might try to repair and repair. And if the person says they’ll change, but they don’t, then you have to say, ‘Can I stay true to my values and be in a deep, intimate relationship with this person?’ And that was what I was feeling.”

It’s clear she tried for a long time. She raised her children – she has two daughters and a son – in an admirably grounded house, insisting they were called “French” at school, and asking Bill to do the school run some days to help her out. (This, apparently, endeared her to other mums because then they could say to their husbands: “If Bill Gates does the school run, get over yourself, busy man!”)

The children did not get phones until they turned 14, earned a weekly allowance, and if they wanted something more, they had to ask for it for Christmas. (Of course, the Gates’ oldest daughter, Jennifer, now a paediatrician, began high-level show jumping as a child, which is hardly an everyman sport.)

The Gates were careful not to put their names on educational buildings as philanthropy brags, for instance, in case their children ended up at those institutions. As French Gates told The New York Times, “I went to school with some of those [kinds of] kids at Duke University, and I vowed to myself that if I ever had resources at my disposal, those were not the kind of children I wanted to raise”.

What about the kind of husband she wanted to have? She clearly adores her father (The Next Day is dedicated to both her parents), and she writes how he “never diminished [my mother, sister and I], [never] made us feel small and unserious, [never] reinforced a power hierarchy that placed us at the bottom”. There have been occasional reports that Bill used to talk over the top of French Gates at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, or belittle her suggestions, but French Gates herself seems robust about such stories. “Bill has a reputation as one of the toughest negotiators in the world,” she writes at one point: this stuff comes with the territory.

Melinda (at right) aged 19 with her family in 1983.Credit: Courtesy of the Gates Archive

Nonetheless, in a chapter entitled “Distil Your Inner Voice”, French Gates writes of deciding that she’s got to leave the marriage. This internal voice, she explains, had always helped her “set the course of my life and correct my bearings when I got lost”, but during the difficult years with Bill, it had slowly fallen silent. And then – thanks to therapy and a gang of friends she calls her Truth Council (old work colleagues and mates from the early days of motherhood) – she found it again. Or, perhaps more accurately, she nerved herself to hear it again. And it “ultimately led to what I needed to do, which was to end my marriage”.

She drove out of Seattle to nearby Hood Canal (where the Gates family has a summer home) to tell Bill. “We had a long conversation – respectful, not rancorous, even a little tender in moments,” she writes. Then she got back in the car and drove home. On the way, she pulled into a parking lot, put on a Willie Nelson song, and burst into tears over the steering wheel. Then she sat up, started the car and drove home.

‘I’m someone who’s been through a lot of therapy.’

Lots of books that contain advice for life, as French Gates’ does, tell you how to solve your problem: save your marriage, find true love, succeed at work. And then the book is over, as if life stops after the goal is reached. But it’s at precisely this moment that Melinda French Gates makes the most interesting point in her book, which has arguably led to the most interesting point in her life. Once the big decision is made, she says, when the wreckage is still lying in pieces around you: stop. Because this is the richest point in the journey. French Gates calls this state-of-flux point “a transitional space”: a liminal ground, like a clearing in a forest, between one part of life and another. “When something ends, I think in our haste, or sometimes our anxiety, we want to rush to the next thing,” she says. But if we can bear to stay in that clearing for a while, we can open up more options for how we react, what we learn, and what we choose to do next.

“I’ll give you a really small example,” she goes on, leaning forward. “One of my friends got a medical diagnosis that looked pretty bad, and she needed another set of tests. But the health system is busy, and it was going to be 10 weeks before she knew for sure. And she absolutely could have tried to elbow her way into the system and maybe get that down to two weeks. [But] she said, ‘The difference between a diagnosis in 10 weeks versus two weeks won’t change the course of whatever this is, [so] I just need to be comfortable being in this uncomfortable place of not knowing.’ ” It gave her “time to practise” handling whatever the result might be, says French Gates; time to figure out her priorities and choose how to move forward.

If this sounds almost impossibly difficult, it is – and French Gates knows it. As a “recovering perfectionist”, who once wildly over-prepared for every meeting and beat herself up over even the smallest perceived failing, she’s not someone who relinquishes control naturally. Getting to – and staying in – the clearing in the forest at the end of her marriage, she says wryly, wasn’t easy. “I’m someone who’s been through a lot of therapy,” she smiles. It was made harder because Bill Gates didn’t want a divorce: in January this year, he told The Times in the UK that the break-up of his marriage was “the mistake I most regret” in his life. “There’s a certain wonderfulness to spending your entire adult life with one person,” he said, “because of the memories and depth of things you have done, and having kids together. When Melinda and I met, I was fairly successful but not ridiculously successful – that came during the time that we were together. So, she saw me through a lot.”

With her children (from left) Phoebe, Rory and Jennifer in 2003.Credit: Courtesy of the Gates Archive

But French Gates herself has no regrets. She describes herself in The Next Day after the separation as being like a boat tied to a pier, engines revving but unable to move, suffering panic attacks during the settlement negotiations. But she survived. And divorce cut the rope. Today, she lives in a regular Seattle neighbourhood, rather than at the palatial compound called Xanadu 2.0 that Bill built just before their marriage; she can walk to the shops; she’s even been dating again (most recently, according to reports, tech entrepreneur Philip Vaughn). She’s now at a point where she can write generously about Bill (the family appear to still share some holidays), immerse herself in their shared children and grandchildren, and commit herself to a new mission for which her wealth, personality and experience uniquely qualify her: the task of creating a significantly better world for millions of people. Especially women and girls.

Women in need

It is common to talk about Pivotal Ventures as French Gates’ new project, focused on female empowerment in the US. But she was interested in women and girls for years at the foundation: her first book, The Moment of Lift, is subtitled How Empowering Women Changes the World. As she writes: “If you want to lift up humanity, empower women. It is the most comprehensive, pervasive, high-leverage investment you can make in human beings.” She founded Pivotal Ventures in 2015; last year, she moved to it full-time. What is new, perhaps, is French Gates’ urgency about the plight of women and girls, especially in the US. “Because of many of the things that have happened in the US in the last few years,” she says carefully – the rise of Donald Trump; the defeat of abortion rights in Roe v Wade – “my granddaughter will not have as many rights as I had. And that just should not be.”

The need for someone like French Gates to shift her focus to domestic issues feels, frankly, like an indictment on just how bad things really are in the US. For years, her philanthropy has been directed towards the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, and her move now seems a tacit admission that at least some of those people are now in her own backyard. “Well, if you are a mum giving birth in the US today, you’re three times more likely to die than you are in any other high-income country,” she says. “And we are the only high-income country in the world that does not have paid family medical leave. I mean, that is just senseless.”

‘My granddaughter will not have as many rights as I had. And that just should not be.’

In response, in 2019, French Gates pledged $US1 billion over the course of 10 years towards advancing women’s rights. Last year, she committed an additional $US1 billion. This money is being spent in a multitude of ways: $US150 million towards dismantling barriers for women in the workplace; $US250 million towards improving women’s health; $US240 million for partnering with a diverse group of global leaders. The latter project is an example of the way French Gates often utilises her money. She combines two approaches to philanthropy: the data-driven model championed by people like Bill Gates, and trust-based giving, more in line with someone like MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, with whom French Gates is friends. In one, you look to prove the value of your spend with highly measurable outcomes; the other is less about project-linked proof and more about partnership and the vibe of the thing.

In Paris with Bill Gates in 2017 after they received one of France’s highest awards for their foundation’s work.Credit: Getty Images

French Gates’ global leaders partnership program, for instance, involves carefully choosing a dozen female leaders with proven track records on the global stage in advancing the cause of women and girls, then giving them each $US20 million and the freedom to spend it as they see fit. Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern is one of the chosen leaders; so is a Kenyan social entrepreneur called Sabrina Habib, who has set up a network of small, community daycares in East Africa, in cultures that have never acknowledged the way unpaid childcare traps and disempowers women. Habib has created not only a successful business but an effective social enterprise, yet it’s exactly these sorts of groups – established by women, utilised by women, benefiting women and children – that attract less than 2 per cent of global philanthropic giving, and only about 3 per cent of venture capital funding. It’s in filling this gap, among others, that French Gates sees her role, and that of private philanthropy.

Another is big-ticket items: family paid leave, for instance, or contraception, or abortion rights – all of which are either non-existent or in peril in most American states. “Warren Buffett gave us some great advice years ago,” says French Gates. “He said, ‘OK, don’t be too tough on yourself. You’re working on the problems that society’s left behind because they are hard. But also, don’t be afraid to take big swings. You’re gonna miss sometimes. And yes, you’ll have some dollars that don’t turn out to do anything good, but every now and then you’re going to get a home run, and that is really going to change things.’ ”

Try something innovative, Buffett suggested; think outside the box. Don’t limit yourself. French Gates tries to remember that, she says: despite her natural caution, she tries to take risks with some of her “ridiculous” money. “What philanthropy can do is it can take risks that taxpayers wouldn’t want their government to take with their money,” she explains. “It can prove things out. It can fail at some things, but the things that get proven out, you then get civil society to use their voice and say, ‘We want more of this.’ And then you can get governments involved. When it works out, everyone has a role; everyone’s part of it.”

Of course, things don’t always work out, as Melinda French Gates knows. On a personal level, or a professional one. But she seems genuinely positive about the future. I ask her how she stays upbeat when things – especially in the US – look so much like a disaster. “Well, when I see, for instance, more females going into [US] state legislatures,” she says, nodding. “There are 7000 legislative seats at the state level. They have immense power to create policy and to move state dollars. So as I see that number ticking up – a couple of states now literally have equality in terms of male and female legislatures – that keeps me hopeful.” She tilts her head. “Even if things look, you know, at the national level, much, much more difficult.”

We both pause. Is it impolite to rail against Trump from half a world away, I wonder? Given French Gates’ beautiful manners, I just can’t do it. French Gates, meanwhile, is still hunting, American-like, for the silver lining. “Just small acts of kindness, those all give me hope,” she says, smiling. “I think of them as drops in the bucket, right? You can put drops in the bucket, but over time, guess what? You fill up your bucket.”

The Next Day: Transitions, Change and Moving Forward by Melinda French Gates (Macmillan, $37), is out on April 15.

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