Bill Gates and Melinda Ann French have announced their separation after 27 years

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, for years the richest person in the world and an oracle of the coronavirus pandemic, announced on his Twitter account your separation from Melinda Ann French, his partner for 27 years, with whom he directs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the couple have three children: Rory, Phoebe and Jennifer.

“After thinking a lot and working hard on our relationship, we decided to end our marriage. Over the past 27 years, we have raised three amazing children and built a foundation that works around the world to enable everyone to lead healthy and productive lives. We continue to share the belief in this mission and will continue to work together at the foundation, but we no longer believe that we can grow together as a couple in the next phase of our life. We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life, ”says the text which law firm Melinda Gates and Bill Gates.

Melinda Ann French worked at Microsoft in 1987; he ran into Bill Gates in the parking lot of the company he had founded (which was already a large company: it had hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and had nearly 2,000 employees). He asked her to go out in two weeks.

“It doesn’t feel spontaneous enough to me,” she replied. “Ask me closer to the date.” He preferred to call her a little later and ask her to go out that evening. She has accepted. A few years later, in 1994, they got married.

Coexistence in these 27 years was not a fairy tale, as Melinda Gates herself (the name she chose for the public) recounted in her autobiography, The Moment of Lift, published in 2019, where she recounts his struggle in a classically macho environment like that. of technology, and the relationship with the man who for years was considered some sort of devil due to Microsoft’s monopoly attitudes while becoming the richest person in the world for several years (today he is fourth ).

An example: One of the conflicts was the annual letter Bill wrote for the foundation they had established in 1995. Melinda was co-chair of the foundation and wanted to write it with him in 2013. Bill didn’t like it. idea. “We both got angry,” Melinda wrote in her autobiography, as this note indicates, adding, “I thought we were going to kill each other. I thought, ‘Well, maybe this will end our marriage at once.’ Ultimately, Bill wrote the 2013 letter, but included a section written by Melinda. In 2014, it became a joint letter, but mostly written by Bill. Finally, in 2015, it became a truly balanced card.

From 2000, with the expansion of the foundation that bears his name, and with his change of attitude towards money (he announced his intention to donate most of his fortune to turn of the century), he has managed to reinvent himself: he is today the oracle of the coronavirus (especially thanks to a prediction in this regard that he made in 2015) and has played a leading role in vaccine research and in preaching by taking public action to stop the pandemic.

As with the divorce between Jeff Bezos and Mackenzie Scott, the inevitable question is how the family’s nearly $ 130,000 million fortune will be divided and how that will affect the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the private foundation. from the country’s largest charity. the world, with a net worth of nearly $ 50,000 million.

THE NATION