“That was the mistake I most regret,” said Bill Gates in a recent interview of his divorce from Melinda French Gates in 2021.
When asked if his divorce was the only failure of his life, the multi-billionaire and tech icon said it would be “at the top of the list,” per U.K. publication The Times.
“There are others but none that matter. The divorce thing was miserable for me and Melinda for at least two years,” he said. The couple split after 27 years of marriage.
Bill and Melinda met at a New York City sales meeting for Microsoft – the groundbreaking tech company Bill co-founded – in 1987. Melinda was a product manager for the company at the time, and the then CEO asked her out for a date… in two weeks.
She rejected the offer at first and told him it wasn’t spontaneous enough, according to People magazine. When he called her around an hour later, Melinda agreed to give it a shot. He proposed six years later and the couple married in 1994. Over the course of their decades-long relationship, the couple had three children (daughters Jennifer and Phoebe as well as son Rory) and established a philanthropic foundation.
When they created that organization aimed at combating global poverty and disease in 2000, it was called the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates told The Times that “I may have to think of the period from the millennium to the pandemic [in 2020] as a heyday when we all became more connected and created the global fund, when we had everyone working together to solve stuff. Now it’s all about yourself.”
Though Melinda stayed on at the foundation after the couple divorced in 2021, she resigned last May and it is now called the Gates Foundation.
“It wasn’t one moment or one specific thing that happened. There just 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,” Melinda told CBS Mornings in March 2022 of their breakup.
In his interview with The Times, Gates, now 69, admitted that he struggled with social cues as a child and could be “rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.” He believes he would be diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum if he was growing up today.
Discussing his success, Gates credits lucky circumstances, including his relationship with Melinda, which he said kept him grounded as his career took off to incredible heights.
“I encouraged Melinda to be a little calmer than my mother was, but we were both quite driven,” he said, after explaining that his mother had high expectations for her children. “I spent more time with the kids than my dad did, but the ratio was still 10:1, with Melinda doing most things for the kids. We had a great time.”
During the final years of their marriage, Gates was accused of having met Jeffrey Epstein before his death in 2019. Melinda had called Epstein, who was charged with child sex trafficking, “evil personified.” Audacy reported in 2021 that Gates admitted to having dinners with Epstein and that he regretted it.
Gates looks back on his marriage fondly.
“There is a certain wonderfulness to spending your entire adult life with one person 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,” he told The Times. “So, she saw me through a lot. When we got divorced it was tough and then she made the decision to leave the foundation – I was disappointed that she took the option to go off.”
Currently, Forbes describes French Gates as “one of the most powerful women in philanthropy,” and, as of last October, estimated her settlement from the divorce at $29 billion. It said that she has focused on her commitment to support women’s and girls’ rights, including a May 2024 $1 billion donation over 3 years to the cause. Shortly after the divorce was announced in 2021, French Gates and MacKenzie Scott, the ex wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, also committed to giving $40 million to organizations that promote gender equality, Audacy reported.
Around that time, The Times caught up with Gates and said that he “he was rattling around his 66,000 square foot Lake Washington mansion,” and living on takeout after his wife and children had moved out. In April of last year, he made a red-carpet debut with his new partner, Paula Hurd, the widow of former Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, People said.
“Melinda and I still see each other – we have three kids and two grandchildren so there are family events,” he told The Times. “The kids are doing well. They have good values.”