The day after Bill and Melinda Gates announced their marriage ending, the media focuses on the background. It was Melinda who filed for divorce, stating that the marriage of one of the richest couples in the world is “hopelessly over”, reveals the gossip site Tmz which allegedly obtained a copy of the request filed by Ms. Gates. The couple have already signed a separation agreement but the document is not included in the divorce request, the site adds.
The divorce papers state that at the time of the marriage, 27 years ago, no prenuptial agreement was signed. And that Melinda Gates didn’t apply for alimony. The site concludes that the couple has filed for a divorce by next April, and expects an agreement to be reached without any legal battle.
It was the same Bill and Melinda Gates who broke the news of the decision to divorce, simultaneously publishing a statement yesterday on their Twitter accounts in which they assured that they will continue to work together with their Foundation. “After thinking for a long time and working hard on our relationship, we have decided to end our marriage,” they wrote.
“We continue to share the faith of the mission and we will continue our work together with the foundation, but we no longer believe we can grow as a couple in the next phase of our lives”, the Gates statement reads. With assets of $ 130.5 billion, the 65-year-old Microsoft co-founder is fourth in Forbes’ list of the richest in the world.
The two met at Microsoft, where Melinda, now 56, worked developing multimedia products for the company. They married in 1994 on Lanai, Island of Hawaii, and have three children. Melinda left Microsoft in 1996 and twenty years ago she emerged from her husband’s shadow and started taking care of the foundation together with her father-in-law Bill Gates sr.
In 2008, Bill gave up his operational positions in the company to work full time with his wife at the Foundation. He also stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in 2014. According to estimates for the end of 2019, the Foundation has distributed grants totaling $ 55 billion for global health programs and education in the United States.
BILL GATES WILL HAVE TO DIVIDE ASSETS, MORE EXPENSIVE DIVORCE AFTER BEZOS
The divorce between Bill and Melinda Gates promises to be the most expensive since the one between Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie in 2019. With assets of 130 billion dollars, the Gates are fourth on the list of the richest in the world, after Bezos , Elon Musk and Bernard Arnault.
The divorce agreement between the Amazon founder and his wife left Bezos 75% of the company’s common stock, which was then worth $ 144 billion, and left his wife the remaining 25%, worth $ 144 billion. 35.8 billion. According to the American media, Bill and Melinda have already done a division of assets, since the divorce request mentions a “separation agreement” by mutual consent that the two have already signed.
The couple’s huge assets include residences in five US states; a fleet of cars including a collectible Porsche, worth 2 million dollars; an art collection, which includes the Code Hammer, the manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci, worth 30 million dollars; a series of private planes.
In addition, Gates is also the largest private owner of farmland, 242,000 acres spread across 18 different states. As is known, the Gates have announced that upon their death they will give most of their assets to charity: their three children – Jennifer, 25, Phoebe, 18 and Rory, 21 – should inherit ‘only’ 10 million dollars each, a fraction of the immense fortune of the parents.
The family’s main residence is a mansion, known as Xanadu 2.0, facing Lake Washington, a few miles from downtown Seattle, where the Gates Foundation is also located. Gates bought the land in 1988 for two million, and it took him seven years to build the house of his dreams, at a cost of $ 63 million. Now it’s worth 125.
“I wanted something beautiful but nothing ostentatious – wrote Gates in his book ‘The Road Ahead’ – I wanted a house that could accommodate sophisticated technology, advanced but not intrusive to make it clear that technology must be a servant, not the master “.
LA FOUNDATION
The news of Bill and Melinda Gates’ divorce comes after their Foundation has become a benchmark in the global fight against Covid, with a total investment of $ 1.75 billion. The funds were earmarked for vaccine research, testing and treatment programs, and programs to help health systems in poorer countries cope with the pandemic.
The commitment was not limited to funding: Bill Gates in recent months has been one of the most passionate supporters of the need to follow science to fight the pandemic. A commitment that actually preceded the outbreak of the Covid emergency, with the funding of research on infectious diseases.
Melinda Gates had a fundamental role in the foundation and the first development of the Foundation: it was she, when her husband was still working full time with Microsoft, who traveled the world to verify the main needs on the ground and then set the agenda of the charity. In 2006 she was invited to the White House to speak about the fight against malaria and in 2010 she spoke at the UN General Assembly on the fight against AIDS and poverty.
Since Gates left operational positions at Microsoft in 2008, the couple have begun working side-by-side with the Foundation. And in their public appearances, they rarely talked about their relationship. Melinda made a reference to a difficult moment in ‘The Moment of Lift’, a book written in 2019 to explain “how empowering women changes the world”.
WHEN BILL MADE A ‘PRO AND AGAINST’ WEDDING LIST WITH MELINDA
A list of the “pros and cons” of marriage on the chalkboard. It is what Bill Gates did when he finally decided to marry Melinda from whom he is now preparing to divorce. It was the same couple who revealed this during the Netflix series ‘Inside Bill’s Brain’, released in 2019.
“He had to make a decision,” laughed Melinda as she recounted when she discovered the list. “I took the idea of marriage very seriously,” added Bill during the documentary interview. The two met at a dinner in New York in 1987, shortly after Melinda joined Microsoft as a product manager.
After being together for a while, “we cared a lot for each other and there were only two possibilities: we would either break up or get married,” Gates recounted in the documentary, recalling his list of pros and cons. While Melinda explained that her future husband’s doubts concerned her professional commitment: “She wanted to get married, but she didn’t know if she could truly commit and continue to lead Microsoft together.” The couple eventually got married in 1994.