Billion-Dollar Divorce

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, are to split. Here’s a look at their love story and what’s at stake in their separation

- Kim Abrahams

WHEN they got married, a simple wedding gift from her parents would become one of her most treasured possessions.

It was a sculpture of two little birds sitting side by side staring at the horizon, and she put it in the front garden of their home so she could see it whenever she came and went.

“Those birds are still in front of our house,” she wrote in 2018 in her and her husband’s annual newsletter. “I think of it all the time because fundamentally Bill and I are looking in the same direction.”

How poignant those words are now – and how bittersweet that sculpture must be. After 27 years of marriage, three kids, billions of dollars and decades of philanthropy, Bill and Melinda Gates are no longer looking in the same direction. And it’s no exaggeration to say their split has left the world gobsmacked.

In a world where high-flying couples get divorced all the time, the Gateses seemed stable and “normal”, a slightly geeky couple who cared more about the greater good of the planet and its people than a life of glitz and glamour.

“It’s not fair that we have so much wealth when billions of others have so little,” Melinda once said.

Since their 1994 wedding they’ve donated at least $40 billion ($580bn) to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds IT education in the US and healthcare and poverty initiatives around the world, including large-scale projects to fight HIV and malaria.

When Covid-19 began to ravage the globe, the Gates Foundation was one of the earliest and largest funders of research into a vaccine.