Curious affair of Bill Gates, a public benefactor with feet of clay
The story of the Bill and Melinda Gates split reminds us that the very rich are good at controlling the narrative.
Hands up if you always knew Bill Gates had been a womaniser in earlier days and that the real reason he took seven years to marry Melinda was not that he was a geek but because he was too busy swimming with naked ladies.
Right. Me neither.
Didn’t we all prefer the narrative that spoke to Bill being a workaholic, a skinny, somewhat grey nerd who was undeniably brilliant but not what you’d immediately describe as sexy? It has been such a good story of the multi-billionaire who has, quite literally in some cases, changed the world by applying his money in a considered, even meticulous, fashion that reflected his curiosity, diligence and smarts.
Bill Gates has been a huge influence on the world in the past 40 years, through the development of Microsoft and through the $US50bn ($64bn) foundation that since 2000 has been a joint operation with wife Melinda.
A shock then to read of, arguably, the divorce of the decade.
Irretrievable, is what Melinda called the marriage that had looked robust and real for almost 30 years. The (uncoupling) couple tweeted about their three kids and that they would continue to run the foundation.
OK. Not much to work with there, but surely there was much we were not being told?
We waited while a few media outlets had a go.
Perhaps it was the death late last year of Bill’s father — who had been a huge force in the lives of his son and daughter-in-law — that had released them from hanging on in a marriage turned dull. Or maybe Melinda had simply tired of a man who took up all the oxygen in the room, who was so powerful he didn’t even notice if she was being sidelined. Maybe there were just too many disagreements about where to donate the billions.
Whatever. It all sounded a bit lame but at least, we sighed, it didn’t look like the Jeff Bezos-MacKenzie Scott break-up in 2019 ago, which seemed to involve the Amazon boss having a nice time with the woman who later became his girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez.
But there were hints that the Gateses’ adult children were, as the Americans say, pissed at their dad for “what he had done”.
Then the floodgates opened with the revelation that Melinda had been, well, pissed at Bill for having “met with” Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious paedophile, as far back as 2013.
No one can blame her, Epstein being someone most people had not wanted in the house since he was convicted in a Florida court in 2008 of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute.
That was of course only the tip of Epstein’s iceberg but he re-entered well-heeled society after a year in jail. It was a decade later before he was once again arrested on charges of sex trafficking in minors. Epstein died in his cell in 2019 but his appalling legacy lingers. Even if the connection was about Epstein raising money for the foundation, it’s damaging. Think on the fact that the Gates foundation has spent many, many millions over the years on programs to lift up women and girls and that gender equality is a major part of its programming.
But wait, there’s more. We know now that Bill has history. Geek, yes, but no slouch back in the day, as able to pull the ladies as pull those all-nighters in the pursuit of tech breakthroughs. What’s more, it seems it’s pretty well known that Bill was no angel, it was just that the media was not keen to out the (then) world’s richest man.
It was beginning to feel a bit like the JFK fairy story, the one where president John Kennedy was not only handsome but also faithful to Jackie, the one that had involved so many sins of omission from so many journalists who knew a great deal about his sexual encounters but kept it out of the papers throughout his political career.
Then the floodgates opened (no pun intended) and now Bill’s reputation is taking a shellacking, thanks to something of a #MeToo moment with Bill’s affair with an employee 20 years ago prompting an investigation recently by the Microsoft board. Well, well, well.
There’s just a chance that some are still thinking — who cares what Kennedy or Gates got up to in their private lives? An office affair is not a great idea but was certainly far less incendiary two decades ago than it is now. Even the Epstein connection could be seen as the business of philanthropy.
After all, Bill Gates has been responsible for remarkable change through his billions, giving back in an inspirational way. How naive anyway to believe that an incredibly rich, powerful and smart man, was not going to stray a little over the years, even if he wears dad jerseys.
So, a chance then that this extraordinary philanthropist will hold on to his reputation — and celebrity — for doing enormous good around the world?
Maybe not.
Whichever way you look at it, the Epstein angle is messy. Big philanthropic foundations need to be careful about the company they keep. If we had known that Bill and others in the Gates foundation had continued a connection with Epstein over several years, we would have been disappointed. And we surely preferred the story of a strong Gates marriage than the one emerging now.
The Gates story as it has seeped out reminds us that the very rich are good at controlling the narrative. Bill’s celebrity generated immense public scrutiny, yet his public image has been remarkably one-dimensional over decades. What little talk there was of the difficulties in the marriage was itself controlled by Melinda, who wrote about it in her 2019 book. If anything those “revelations” about her struggle to find her own voice, seemed to make the marriage more real, as complicated and ordinary as anyone’s.
The problem for the Gateses now is that we have so much invested in our benefactors being beyond reproach. We may agree with F. Scott Fitzgerald that the very rich are different from you and me but we yearn for the opposite and indeed we like stories about them as regular people, albeit with better homes and cars.
Our hunger for heroes — even among the very rich — makes it hard for us to recognise their flaws. We want our philanthropists to be good people, not just good at making and distributing vast sums of money. It’s not especially rational: after all, their marital fidelity doesn’t make any difference to the value of the millions they give to worthy projects.
Still, it’s hard to escape the sense that Bill, and indeed the Gates Foundation, will take a while to recover the glow that put them on the side of the angels for so long.
