Bill and Melinda Gates: a duo undone

From South African townships to parties at Davos — Bill and Melinda Gates came as a pair. And when they announced the end of their marriage, they did that together too.

Bill and Melinda Gates share the stage at a Stanford commencement ceremony in California in 2013. Picture: AFP

From muddy streets in South Africa’s townships to cocktail parties at Davos — Bill and Melinda Gates came as a pair.

Together, they built a charitable empire through Bill’s technology company Microsoft and the massive non-profit they co-founded and co-chair, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And when it came time to ­announce the end of their 27-year marriage, they did that as a pair too — in a joint statement posted to their respective Twitter accounts at exactly the same moment on Tuesday (AEST).

Mr Gates, 65, summed it up like this in a 2019 Netflix documentary series: “In the case of Melinda, it is truly an equal partner.

The Gates in a village at Patna district in India's Bihar's state in 2011. Picture: AFP

“She’s a lot like me in that she is optimistic and she is interested in science. She is better with people than I am. She’s a tiny bit less hardcore about knowing, you know, immunology, than I am.”

Mr Gates grew up in Seattle and fell in love with machines and computer programming as a geeky-looking 13-year-old. He left Harvard University after two years to start “Micro-soft”, a software company, with a childhood friend.

On the other side of the country, Melinda French was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1965. The first computer she ever used was an Apple II, and she developed an ­interest in computer games and programming at school.

The couple met in 1987, shortly after Melinda started working at Microsoft as a product manager, her first job after graduating from Duke University.

The pair ended up sitting next to each other at a business dinner and hit it off. Melinda, now 56, ­described her future husband in the Netflix documentary as “funny and very high-energy”.

But Bill didn’t ask her out until a few months later, when they bumped into each other in the Microsoft car park. He asked her on a date — in two weeks.

The Gates family.

Melinda teased him for not being “spontaneous enough” and told him to call her closer to the date. A few hours later, he called her at home and asked her out for that night.

They married in 1994 and had three children. Before he popped the question, Melinda says she caught Bill weighing the decision by writing out the pros and cons of marriage on a white board.

The couple would go on to revolutionise the technology world: Bill through Microsoft software, Melinda through helping carve out space for women in the male-dominated industry.

They launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, and it is now among the world’s richest, having provided more than $US54bn in grants over two decades in areas including malaria and infectious disease control, agricultural research, basic health care and sanitation, in various parts of the world.

In 2019, the foundation had net assets of more than $US43bn.

Mr Gates is one of the richest people in the world. His net worth was $US137bn ($177bn) as of February, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranking.

The couple’s divorce could create new questions about their wealth, most of which has yet to be donated to their foundation.

Bill Gates in 1994.

Bill moved away from Microsoft in 2006 to focus more on philanthropy. In 2010, he and Melinda, along with Warren Buffett, created the Giving Pledge, which encourages billionaires to give the majority of their wealth to charity.

Initially, Bill wrote the foundation’s annual newsletter, but Melinda asked to co-author it in 2013. Although they argued about the idea — to the point that Melinda said in her 2019 memoir she thought their marriage would end because of it — they ultimately compromised.

Ms Gates filed for divorce in Washington state on Monday, but no financial details were included in the publicly available documents.

“We continue to share a belief in (our) mission and will continue our work together at the foundation,” their statement said.

“But we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives.”

The world’s richest man, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and his wife MacKenzie Scott divorced in 2019 after a 25-year marriage. Ms Scott, who has devoted much of her time to philanthropic efforts, recently remarried. She said last year she had given away more than $US4bn of her fortune.

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