Bill Gates has always dealt in numbers. Take 2,368, for instance – the number of times his name appears in three million pages of Jeffrey Epstein files released by the US Department of Justice earlier this year.
Or how about three? That’s the number of women that Gates has admitted to having affairs with during an hours-long interview with the US House Oversight Committee on 10 June about his friendship with Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial over sex crimes.
The transcripts were released this week and make for eyebrow-raising reading, not least for the three women that Gates had affairs with and has now named: bridge player Mila Antonova, nuclear physicist Karima Nigmatulina and medical entrepreneur Dr Alice Jacobs Nesselrodt. Who can guess how they’re feeling right now?
Of course, being included in the Epstein files is no indication of criminality and he hasn’t been accused of any. But, undeniably, the long-held image of Gates as a happy, family man who just happens to possess unimaginable wealth (currently about $105bn) has shattered.
The cracks started to show in 2019, when details of his association with Epstein leaked out. It was allegedly the final straw for his wife of 27 years and mother of their three children, Melinda French Gates, who hired lawyers. The couple divorced in 2021 amid allegations of infidelity – official line, “We no longer believe we can grow together.”
“I am so happy to be away from all the muck that was there,” French said in an interview, after the Epstein files were released this year. “It’s personally hard whenever those details come up because [it] brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage.”
Melinda French Gates and Bill Gates divorced in 2021 amid allegations of infidelity (Photo: Michele Crowe/CBS via Getty)That “muck” has kept on coming. Take the draft email that Epstein seemingly sent to himself in which he accuses Gates of contracting a sexually transmitted infection: “To add insult to injury,” it read, “you then subsequently with tears in your eyes, implore me to please delete the emails regarding your std, your request that I provide you with antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda, and the description of your penis.”It’s a long way from the days of the Microsoft power couple who gave away $50bn together via their foundation and sat side-by-side in matching glass offices, with matching desks.
Gates has strongly denied giving his ex-wife medication – although he confessed to having “some concern about whether I had an STD” – and claimed to Congress that the email was evidence the paedophile financier was planning to blackmail him. The files also contain multiple photographs of the two men smiling side by side.
“I never went to his island, his ranch, or his Florida home. I have never victimised anyone,” he told the committee. “While he may have sought to foster a personal relationship, I was never interested in that and never reciprocated.”
The Microsoft co-founder was mentioned in the Epstein files 2,368 times (Photo: Justice Department)When he was challenged on having associated with Epstein between 2011 and 2014, despite knowing of his 2008 criminal conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, Gates replied: “I have regret that I didn’t factor that in to a greater degree.”
How could anyone be so stupid? Unthinking? Selfish? It seems especially odd from a man who has spent decades cultivating the image of the shy, awkward genius who quit Harvard to co-found Microsoft in 1975 and became the youngest US billionaire aged 31, receiving an honorary knighthood from the late Queen Elizabeth II and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.
Since 2000, he has pledged to eradicate infectious diseases, poverty and, of course, his own wealth – which he said, in a statement last year, that he would give away over the next two decades “to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world” before closing the foundation for good.
So, should we be surprised at this latest turn of events? That a man like Bill Gates had affairs? According to his biographer Tim Schwab, author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, Gates has a history of reinventing himself in the public eye.
And, it is now easy to forget that Gates went through a period of extreme turbulence. In 1998, he was taken to court by the federal government in a high-profile antitrust case, which found Microsoft was monopolising the personal computer market (they settled). The Gates name became a byword for Machiavellian behaviour – he was even mocked on The Simpsons, and that’s when you know you’re disliked.
In 2011, he was accused of cheating his childhood friend and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, out of his fair share at a time when Allen had blood cancer. This was detailed in Allen’s 2011 memoir Idea Man and never publicly disputed by Gates.
Cue reinvention. “Suddenly, Bill Gates was the most generous philanthropist on earth,” writes Schwab in his book. It’s why, he tells me, we shouldn’t be surprised by the latest revelations. “Gates has done a great job over the last few decades of marketing himself first as the boy genius and then the avuncular humanitarian,” he says. “But if you go back in his history, he’s always been kind of a bad boy – racing fast cars, a very combative management style, Alpha male energy.
“We forget that he was accused of misconduct towards female employees [which he has denied] and he pursued Melinda when she was his subordinate at Microsoft. So, I’m not surprised to learn about extramarital affairs at all.”
As for the association with Epstein, Schwab refers to the famous Maya Angelou quote: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
“I think it tells us that he is, in reality, a very different person than he’s led us to believe. Bill Gates today remains the exact same kind of cunning and calculating business-driven, hyper-competitive guy who ran Microsoft,” he says. “People have long been lulled into this misleading narrative that there are two different Bill Gates – the cold-hearted monopolist and the kind-hearted, soft-spoken humanitarian. There are not two different Bill Gates.”
As for whether he’ll come through this unscathed? After all, Gates has already had a second act, and we don’t tend to like giving people third chances. Not to mention that, during previous hiccups, he had Melinda by his side (he’s now rumoured to be in a relationship with philanthropist and former tech executive Paula Hurd).
“I think what we’re seeing right now is a real test of his political mettle, of his political power, of how much influence he still has and to what extent his reputation is so hurt that he’s not going to be able to recover from it,” says Schwab.
In the court of public opinion, Schwab isn’t convinced this is the final curtain for Gates. “I wouldn’t underestimate him. He’s weathered so many scandals over the years without serious consequences that it’s certainly possible that this scandal can go away without material consequences for him,” he says. “I’m just hoping that this opens the door to a wholesale reappraisal of billionaire philanthropy – does it have too much power, is it too big? One thing is for sure, it’s a big and interesting moment in Bill Gates’s fascinating career.”
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