Bill Gates acknowledges affair with employee, which Microsoft investigated

SEATTLE - Bill Gates acknowledged through a spokeswoman that he had an extramarital affair with a Microsoft employee, which Microsoft said led its board to investigate the “intimate relationship” shortly before he resigned from the board last year.

It is not clear what role the investigation or the affair, which took place two decades ago, played in the decision the Microsoft co-founder and his wife, Melinda French Gates, made to divorce after 27 years of marriage. When they announced their divorce earlier this month, the couple posted identical and simultaneous tweets saying that “after a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage.”

In a divorce filing that day, French Gates called the marriage “irretrievably broken.”

“There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably,” Gates’s spokeswoman, Bridgitt Arnold, said in an emailed statement.

French Gates’s divorce lawyer, Robert Cohen, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Members of Microsoft’s board in 2019 looked into a Microsoft engineer’s allegations that she had a sexual relationship with Gates, according to Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw.

“Microsoft received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000,” Shaw said in an emailed statement. “A committee of the Board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm to conduct a thorough investigation. Throughout the investigation, Microsoft provided extensive support to the employee who raised the concern.”

Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board in March 2020, but Arnold disputed that his departure was related to the investigation into the affair.

“Bill’s decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter,” Arnold said. “In fact, he had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Microsoft directors decided that Gates needed to leave the board as it investigated the relationship.

Shaw declined to say what the investigation revealed.

Separately, the New York Times reported Sunday that Gates pursued women who worked both at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. French Gates hired divorce lawyers in 2019, after meetings Gates had with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein became public, the Times also reported. Epstein, who had been charged with sexually abusing dozens of young girls in the early 2000s, died by suicide while in custody in 2019.

Arnold said Gates’s relationship with Epstein was solely related to work.

“It is extremely disappointing that there have been so many untruths published about the cause, the circumstances and the timeline of Bill Gates’ divorce,” Arnold said.

The Gateses’ divorce came as a surprise to many, who saw the couple as a power duo in the world of philanthropy. They spent much of the past two decades running their foundation, which has issued nearly $55 billion in total grant payments through the end of 2019. The couple said in their tweets that they will continue to run the foundation together.

Forbes estimates Gates’s net worth at $128.3 billion, ranking him fourth on its list of the world’s wealthiest people.