What will Melinda Gates do next?

If all goes as well as their apparently amicable divorce has thus far, by around this time next year Melinda Gates will, possibly, be the richest woman in the world or its second richest, vying with the French owner of L’Oreal, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers. There’s maybe only a few billion in it, and, depending on how the stock markets behave, Melinda could just shave it.

Her court date has been set for next April, and, under the jurisdiction of the State of Washington, she is entitled to a straight 50 per cent of the value of the Gates’ fortune amassed since the marriage on New Years Day 1994. Melinda and Bill never bothered with a pre-nuptial agreement, and most of the Gates’ fortune of about $146bn has been accumulated in the interim. Reportedly, Bill has let Melinda have a couple of billion to tide her over for a bit. Like you do. It will leave the now “Ms Melinda French Gates” (partly reverting to her single name, Melinda Ann French) way ahead of the former Mrs Jeff Bezos, Mackenzie Scott, and a bit better off than Ann Walton, one of the heirs to the Walmart empire.

The Gates will have to carve up the assets, such as the main residence, named Xanadu after the one in Citizen Kane, overlooking Lake Washington and occupying what an estate agent would call an “ample” 66,000sq ft, the holiday homes (such as the $60m ranch in Florida), the collection of rare Porsches, the da Vinci manuscript, the farm in Wyoming and an awful lot of Microsoft shares. No doubt it’ll all fit on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, and apparently a “contract of separation” has already been drawn up – the kind of rational, conscientious, slightly nerdy approach you might expect. The kids, though, are grown-up – Jennifer is 25, Rory 21, and Phoebe 18. Their ages are a bit of a clue – speculatively – that the divorce might have been waiting until they all reached the age of maturity. In any case, their parents’ policy is for them to inherit very little of the fortune.

Melinda’s own family background is firmly professional/skilled and conventional and she has an elder sister and two younger brothers, who stay out of the limelight.

In any case, Melinda Gates is about much, much more than becoming the world’s richest divorcee. Watching her progression from Microsoft sales manager in charge of stuff like Encarta (google it), through to stay at home mum in the 1990s and on to the proud social justice warrior of today, her direction of travel seems clear – she is going to have an even louder voice on the world stage than she does now, and she is very likely to make it count by splashing the cash.

She sometimes refers to the honorific speech she gave when she graduated from the Ursuline Academy of Dallas, Texas, in 1982. Quoting Ralph Waldo Mersin, she declared: “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have is to have succeeded”. In an interview with the New York Times at the end of last year she updated the sentiment, with an expensive-sounding twist: “That’s been my definition of success since high school. So if I have an extra dollar, or a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, or in my case, which is absurd, a billion dollars to plough back into making the world better for other people, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Her main interests have been in health and vaccinations in the developing world, educational opportunities and reform in the United States, and, increasingly strong feminist issues such as family planning and promoting more financial independence for women. She has given some moral force to the commonplace economic fact that if men paid women for all their unpaid care then GDP and equality would look very different.

Melinda’s one and so far only book was on that theme: The Moment of Lift – How Empowering Women Changes the World was published in 2019, with a promotional video by Barack Obama and endorsement from Malala Yousafzai. Her YouTube channel, ads-free, has much more of this. It is no disrespect to either woman to imagine that she might develop a public profile like that of Meghan Markle. You wouldn’t be shocked either to see Melinda interviewed by Oprah (net worth, £1.58bn), proceeds to charity.

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Whether Melinda’s billions given to charitable works will be via the current $55bn (£39bn) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and/or through a foundation or projects of her own remains to be determined. The pair jointly established the biggest private charity in the world in 2000, on the standard model of historic tycoons and dynasties, such as the Fords, Carnegies and Rockefellers.

The foundation itself has put out a reassuring statement: “No changes to their roles or the organisation are planned. They will continue to work together to shape and approve foundation strategies, advocate for the foundation’s issues, and set the organisation’s overall direction”. In this case there is a third party – the 90-year-old Warren Buffett, another multi-billionaire and generous benefactor to the foundation. Governance issues are bound to arise. 

Melinda Gates and her role at Microsoft and the foundation have grown as remarkably as the company has since it was founded in 1978. She’s been increasingly influential in what is now the Gates’ main preoccupation, and has hinted in interviews that tensions may have arisen as her role grew, such as in writing the annual letter to stakeholders. In 2012, for example, she says the letter was stressful – “I thought we were going to kill each other. I felt ‘well, this just might end the marriage right here’.” It’s probably unwise to read too much into that, but it is plausible that their personal and philanthropic priorities have diverged a bit – his still rooted in medicine and science, hers gravitating towards feminism and rights issues, and thus a bit more “political”. She has long insisted that they are “a partnership of equals”, but what happens when the equals, respectfully, disagree?

She met Bill, the legend goes, back in 1987 when she sat next to him at a dinner at a trade fair (coincidence?). He later spotted her in the car park and asked her on a date, about three weeks in advance, and she told him to try being a bit more spontaneous, and gave him her phone number. They bonded over games of Cluedo, though there’s no truth in the rumour that they did it with a dagger in the computer room.

As a maths and computer scientist from Duke University, they were compatible in that sense, and shared much in common, as she later described: "I think he got intrigued when I beat him at a math game and won the first time we played Cluedo, the board game where you figure out who did the murder in what room with what weapon. He urged me to read The Great Gatsby, his favourite novel, and I already had, twice.” They dated for about seven years before getting hitched, meaning their relationship has lasted more than three decades – longer than many subjected to the strains of fame and, perversely, obscene wealth. 

Though hardly in the Bill league, she knew her stuff. Her father, an aerospace engineer, and an inspirational teacher, a Ms Bauer at St Monica Catholic School, had introduced her to the cute little Apple II personal computer when she was 14, and her love of processing “data” holds to this day – she says she and Bill always compare notes on their visits to the foundation’s projects around the world, and always she placed their observations against the stats.

In her words: “I’m a computer scientist. I like data because it tells us where to go and how to act.” The data on the number of newborn infants who die on their first day – 1 million a year – is the kind of thing that moves her; and her dedication to family planning and accessible contraception has put her at odds with the Catholic Church, of which she is a member. For more than two decades Bill and Melinda have shared this liberal outlook and worked hard to make the world a slightly, better place. They recognise the flaw in the whole notion of philanthropy, however, even among the mega-rich, which is that they cannot replace government funding, still less set public policy.

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By her account, Bill Gates used a whiteboard to determine the upsides and downsides of them marrying. Yet there was a love story too, though. Some years ago Bill’s father, confusingly named William Gates Junior, told of the family’s delight when Bill married Melinda, “a perfect match”, on a Hawaiian island, with Willie Nelson flown in as cabaret. He recalled thinking Melinda “a wonderful person, a perfect match for him – very, very, bright, very organised, very supportive, very interested in family and good family life”. Indeed so.

Soon she gave up her job to, start a family because she “didn’t want our children brought up by strangers”, and she gave birth to Jennifer in 1996, a year after her husband gave birth to Windows 95. When he was asked what his best decision had been Bill Gates replied without hesitation “Well, I picked my wife”, which was probably “the right answer”.

So, as the lovely, late Ms Merton might ask, what attracted Melinda to the billionaire Bill Gates? “I was definitely attracted to his brilliant mind, but beyond that, his curiosity. And he has a huge sense of fun. I love that wry side of him.” Fair enough. Her mother, Elaine Agnes (nee Amerland), had her doubts about her dating the boss, but, until lately, it all worked out fine. Her choice of workplace was a wise one. Having already aphid an offer to join IBM, a much bigger, staider, firm, she also thought she’d see what this upstart Microsoft was like. After her interview, she thought “oh my gosh, I have to work at this company. They are changing the world, and if they give me an offer I’m not going to not take it”.

Now, Melinda Gates has the chance to change the world herself, and she seems determined to stay grounded, as she told the New York Times: “There’s no explanation how you get to be in this situation of privilege. There’s just none. But I spend a lot of my waking hours, when we’re not in a pandemic, travelling and meeting other people and doing what I call letting my heart break. I’ve worked in Mother Teresa’s home for the dying. I’ve slept on people’s farms in Africa. I do meditation every morning, and I’ve had days of tears thinking about people I know who’ve lost a loved one. It’s going to those places where your heart really hurts for everybody, not just your own sense of loss.

“And so I cry a lot, and then I come back and I say, ‘How do I take what that person shared with me and what I learned, and how do I plough that back into the work to try and make the world better, or to convince a global leader that they ought to give more money to malaria, or care about people getting a vaccine on the other side of the world, or care about a child not getting a proper education in certain cities in the United States?’ I just try to constantly remember that it’s a privilege.”