But it's fair to say that in the sprawling, Pacific lodge-style home of Melinda and Bill Gates, the complexity was particularly acute. The foundation the couple co-led had been running a flu study in their hometown of Seattle, which had detected early cases of COVID-19 in the region. There were video calls with infectious-disease specialists they funded, world leaders, epidemiologists, journalists, and public-health officials.
Two of their three children were home from school full time. Plus, the couple was secretly separated, trading off who lived at the family house and who was elsewhere while they tried to figure out if they could stay married.
"It was a super intense time for us as a foundation," says Melinda French Gates, sitting in her industrial-chic office in Kirkland, Wash., three days after exiting the world-changing organization that bore her name for almost 25 years. "The other thing I would say, though, is, unusually, it gave us the privacy to do what needed to be done in private. You know, I separated first before I made the full decision about a divorce. And to be able to do that in private while I'm still trying to take care of the kids, while still making certain decisions about how you're going to disentangle your life-thank God." Most divorces are not undertaken lightly. They can blow a hole in a couple's finances and health, the happiness of their children, and each partner's self-esteem. French Gates didn't have to worry so much about that first issue. But unlike others, she did have to think about the effect her divorce, finalized two weeks before her 57th birthday in August 2021, might have on the world. It's not an exaggeration to say that if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were damaged by the collapse of the Bill and Melinda Gates marriage, it could affect the welfare of millions of people around the globe.
This story is from the July 15, 2024 edition of Time.
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This story is from the July 15, 2024 edition of Time.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Kate Winslet Puts Lee Miller in the Frame - Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them.
Kate Winslet loves tables. She loves them so much that the Oscar-winning actor collects them. There is nothing fancy about these antiques, but they enchant her. "It's the knots and the whorls, the shape and feel," she says. "They can feel like old friends, and there is something emotionally charging about an old table that comes with a history-I find imagining what that might be enormous fun."
Alfonso Cuarón Goes Long - The Oscar-winning filmmaker finds pathos in our lonely present in his first TV miniseries
A perceptive, generous-spirited child draws on her imagination when she's subjected to the cruelty of a boarding-school headmistress. A lone astronaut, cradled in a damaged space capsule and having lost any hope of returning to Earth, experiences a hallucination that saves her life. A young household servant, abandoned by the man who's gotten her pregnant, miscarries-though his betrayal helps her define what family truly means to her. Loneliness, so universal it has virtually become trademarked the Human Condition, is everywhere in art, and in life: we tend to fetishize it, or at least dab it with a perfume of sentimentality. But Alfonso Cuarón, now more than 30 years into a wide-ranging career that spans pictures like the Frances Hodgson Burnett adaptation A Little Princess, the space reverie Gravity, and the memoir-as-film drama Roma, is more interested in subtle emotional textures, in gradations of feeling that are always specific to the character at hand yet also joltingly recognizable. And now he brings his big-screen, big-story gifts to a limited series, an adaptation of Renée Knight's 2015 psychological thriller Disclaimer.
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