Saturday, January 10, 2026 - American billionaire businessman Bill Gates, has paid $8 billion to his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates' charity, five years after their split over his affairs with other women.
Gates made the $7.88 billion donation to Melinda French
Gates’ Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation in 2024, The New York
Times revealed.
The sum, one of the largest public donations ever recorded,
was revealed in a new tax filing, which shows the first specific
financial terms of the couple’s high-profile split in 2021.
Melinda resigned from The Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation in May 2024. Despite leaving the charity, she
suggested her ex donate $12.5 billion to a new charitable foundation she
intended to create.
A representative for Pivotal told the Times the $12.5
billion agreement has been fulfilled, and the nearly $8 billion donation was
part of that agreement.
Melinda set up her Pivotal Philanthropies
Foundation in 2022, the year after the divorce. At the end of 2023,
it had $604 million on hand.
The billionaire pair split after 27 years together in 2021,
embarking on what is considered the most expensive divorce settlement in the
world. Melinda later received approximately $76 billion in assets.
Months later, details of Gates’ affair with a Microsoft
employee were exposed.
The woman penned a letter to the company’s board in 2019,
divulging details about the fling which began in 2000 and demanded
that his wife, Melinda “read it”.
Microsoft’s board investigated the women’s claims and deemed
the relationship “inappropriate”, the Wall Street Journal reported at the
time.
Gates suddenly quit the board in March 2020 while
the investigation was still in progress – and before the board
could make a formal decision on the matter.
Two further bombshell reports were then revealed, alleging
Gates had routinely hit on staffers at Microsoft and at the
philanthropic foundation he founded alongside his wife.
A separate shocking report claimed that Gates
had sought marriage advice from Jeffrey Epstein, with whom he reportedly
shared a “close” relationship, having first met the
convicted sex offender in 2011.
Gates’ and Epstein’s friendship first came to light in 2019,
months after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell while awaiting
trial on charges of child sex trafficking.
The two men reportedly spent time together on multiple
occasions, flying on Epstein’s private jet – dubbed the “Lolita Express” – and
attending late-night gatherings at his Manhattan home.
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