Melinda Gates: ‘We Always Knew We Would Give Away Our Fortune'

She’s a computer nerd turned stay-at-home mum; a devout Catholic who took the contraceptive pill to Africa. In a deeply honest interview, Melinda Gates talks to Juliet Rieden about her need to give back, and the dark secret that haunted her for decades.

Melinda French had been working at Microsoft for just four months when her boss asked her out on a date. This was the whip-smart Bill Gates, CEO of the company, and his snappy chat-up line after they had struck up a conversation in the office car park, was, “Would you go out with me two weeks from Friday night?”

Melinda is still laughing as she recalls that moment in 1987. “I was a young girl, I didn’t know what my calendar was going to be two weeks from Friday night. I did tease him and said, ‘That’s not really quite spontaneous enough for me.’ So, he asked me for my phone number and I gave it to him… an hour later he called me at my apartment, and said, ‘Well, how about tonight?’” That was more like it. The date ended up being a late-night drink, since Bill had two other appointments on his schedule that evening – he wasn’t faking it, he really was a busy man – but it sparked a union that has moved mountains.

Today Bill and Melinda Gates are in the top 10 most powerful people in the world, not just because of the fortune they made from Microsoft, but because of the billions they choose to giveaway in a bid to fix the world’s biggest issue – poverty. It’s a towering aspiration and as I later discover, the need to give back was a major part of what brought these two computer nerds together.

Dating the boss

Melinda was raised in Dallas, Texas, the second of four children born to Apollo programme aerospace engineer Raymond French and homemaker Elaine. She says she was lucky to have great role models in the progressive nuns who introduced a computer into her school early on, giving her a jump-start into a world that was to become her passion.