Melinda Gates says she is not friends with Bill Gates although they still work together

As much as they still have to work together, ex-couple Melinda French and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates cannot be considered friends. That’s what the ex-wife of the businessman revealed in an interview with the CBS channel. “The relationship is friendly, but ‘friend’ is a strong word for me.” Both split in May 2021 after 27 years of marriage.

The two are co-chairs of the Gates Foundation, a nonprofit research and philanthropic organization they founded. “I believe in this institution. I believe in what we do. My values ​​are on that foundation. I think it has always made us better,” she said.

About the close relationship with the ex, he said he did not consider it an easy task. “I’m not going to say it was easy, but we did it. In my case, I had days when I burst into tears an hour before having a virtual meeting or I got angry, but I got over it and brought my best version,” he told presenter Gayle King. , from CBS Mornings.

The separation, she said, was very painful. For some time she asked herself “how can this be? How can I get up? How am I going to move on?”.

In the 2000s, Bill had an extramarital affair with an employee of his company and this memory came to light during the interview. “I certainly believe in forgiveness, so I thought we had worked through it. It wasn’t a specific moment or thing that happened. There came a moment when there was enough to realize that it wasn’t healthy and I couldn’t trust what we had,” he commented.

However, when asked about reports that Bill had other affairs outside of marriage, she preferred to dodge. “These are questions Bill needs to answer.”

Melinda also said that she did not like her then-husband’s approach to Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile who died in prison in 2019. This was one of the reasons for the divorce.

“I didn’t like him having meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” he said before explaining how the day he met Epstein went. “I wanted to see who this man was and I regretted it from the second I walked through the door. He was the embodiment of evil, I had nightmares about it afterwards.”

Melinda is currently one of the richest women in the world with a fortune valued at $11 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Bill, before the separation, was considered the fourth person with the most money on the planet with an estimated amount of US$ 130 billion.

In May 2021, Bill and Melinda announced they are ending their 27-year marriage, casting doubt on a partnership that has reshaped modern philanthropy and supported one of the leading private responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The couple revealed the decision in a short note on their social media accounts, in which they said the fate of their marriage would not affect the work of the foundation, the world’s largest private charitable organization.

The couple invested much of their fortune in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which seeks to improve health care and reduce poverty in the world. Working with Warren Buffett, they also promoted the Giving Pledge organization as a way for wealthy entrepreneurs to give away a good chunk of their fortune while they were alive.

Melinda is known as the most powerful woman in philanthropy, focusing her work on the rights of women and girls, from family planning to maternal health. She also founded an investment firm called Pivotal Ventures in 2015 to support groups that promise to advance social advancement.

Their work in health and development has also made them influential figures in funding vaccine development and in the debate on combating climate change. Bill recently published a book entitled “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”.

The couple met in 1987, shortly after Melinda joined Microsoft. In a 2019 Netflix documentary, Melinda recalled that Bill wrote a list of marriage pros and cons on a whiteboard before asking for her hand.