‘Will work together in foundation’
Bill and Melinda Gates share the podium as the speakers during the 2014 commencement ceremony at Stanford University. On Monday, May 3, 2021, the couple announced that they are ending their marriage.
The Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda Gates said they are divorcing. But they would continue to work together at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest private charitable foundation.
In a Twitter sharing information on Monday, the pair announcing their separation tweets, one of the richest couples of the world had made the decision to end their marriage of 27 years.
“We have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives,” they said in a statement. “We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life.”
Melinda Gates filed a petition for divorce in King County, Washington, on Monday.
Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world. His net worth was $137 billion as of February, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranking.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder, 65, and the philanthropist and former general manager at Microsoft, 56, married on the Hawaiian island of Lanai on Jan. 1, 1994. They met after she began working at Microsoft as a product manager in 1987.
They share three children: son Rory John, 21, and daughters Phoebe Adele, 18, and Jennifer Katharine, 25.
How the couple end up settling their estate and any impact on the foundation will be closely watched, especially after another high-profile Seattle-area billionaire couple recently ended their marriage.
The Gateses were married in 1994 in Hawaii. The sprawling Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, focussing on global health and development, is the most influential private foundation in the world, with an endowment worth nearly US $50 billion.
Last year, Bill Gates said he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board to focus on philanthropy.
He was Microsoft’s CEO until 2000 and since then has gradually scaled back his involvement in the company he started with Paul Allen in 1975.
He transitioned out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft in 2008 and served as chairman of the board until 2014.
It is to recall here that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos finalized their divorce in 2019. MacKenzie Scott has since remarried and now focuses on her own philanthropy after receiving a 4% stake in Amazon, worth more than US $36 billion.
(Inputs of various sources)
