The Fall of Bill Gates

For nearly 20 years, Bill Gates was the richest person in the world. He pledged to give away nearly all of his vast fortune through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies ever created. He received an honorary knighthood from the Queen, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. In 2005, Time Magazine put him on its cover as one of its Good Samaritans and Persons of the Year. Bill Gates was the model of the good billionaire. Then came the pandemic. Gates had warned of pandemics for years, and COVID thrust him into the spotlight as a de facto authority on public health. His critics argued he wasn't an elected official and had too much power, and fueled conspiracy theories accusing him of using vaccines for control or profit. And now his reputation has gotten worse. Newly released emails from the Epstein files allege Gates got a sexually transmitted infection from sleeping with Russian girls, and that he secretly tried to slip antibiotics to his wife Melinda. Sad. Just unbelievable sadness. Unbelievable sadness, right? And again, I'm able to take my own sadness and look at those young girls and say, my God, how did that happen to those girls, right? By 2021, the image Gates had carefully built for decades was beginning to crack when he and Melinda announced they were ending their marriage after 27 years. In a joint statement, they wrote, we no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives. Melinda eventually walked away from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. To the public, the split came as a shock. Few of any could tell there was trouble on the dance floor. For decades, Gates had been seen as a brilliant software pioneer who dropped out of Harvard to co-found Microsoft and revolutionize personal computing. It was at Microsoft that he met Melinda. He was the boss. She was a product manager. She initially turned him down, but he kept pursuing her. Once the relationship became serious, Gates made a pros and cons list about whether to propose as he was unsure if marriage would interfere with running Microsoft. They ended up tying the knot in Hawaii. Melinda left the company two years later to focus on raising their three kids. Their divorce shattered Gates's squeaky clean image. In an interview with CBS, Melinda hinted at what led to the split. It wasn't one moment or one specific thing that happened. There just came a point in time where there was enough there that I realized it just wasn't healthy and I couldn't trust what we had. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft opened an internal investigation into an affair Gates allegedly had with an employee nearly 20 years prior. Gates ended up stepping down from Microsoft's board. When CBS's Gayle King asked Melinda whether Gates had cheated more than once, she replied, You know, I think those are questions Bill needs to answer. The New York Times reported Gates pursued women on multiple occasions, including asking an employee for dinner in an email, writing, If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened. The woman reportedly laughed it off. But what appeared to trouble Melinda Gates the most was his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a man she said she met only once and later described as abhorrent. He was evil personified. Melinda was deeply uncomfortable with her husband's association with a convicted sex offender who later died in jail. A New York Times investigation found that Gates had met Epstein multiple times, beginning in 2011, years after Epstein had been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor and had to register as a sex offender. According to the Times, Epstein even told members of the Gates Foundation team during meetings at his Manhattan townhouse that his crimes were no worse than stealing a bagel. Gates later admitted meeting with Epstein was a mistake. You know, I've said I regretted having those dinners. And there's nothing, absolutely nothing new on that. Is there a lesson for you, for anyone else looking, looking at this? Well, he's dead. You know, in general, you always have to be careful. He claimed he met with Epstein because of his connections to wealthy donors who showed interest in donating to global health efforts. Bill Gates is now one of many powerful people named in 3 million newly released pages of Epstein's personal communications. In emails that Epstein drafted to himself in July 2013, he claimed he helped Gates get drugs to deal with the consequences of sleeping with Russian girls and also helped facilitate his affairs with married women. In another email, Epstein wrote, to add insult to the injury, you then implore me to please delete the emails regarding your STD. You request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda and the description of your penis. I think we're having a reckoning as a society, right? No girl, no girl should ever be put in the situation that they were put in by Epstein and whatever was going on with all of the various people around him. So whatever questions remain there, what I don't, can't even begin to know all of it, those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband. They need to answer to those things, not me. Apparently, Jeffrey wrote an email to himself. That email was never sent. The email is false. So I don't know what his thinking was there. It just reminds me, every minute I spent with him, I regret and I apologize that I did that. Bill Gates built a reputation on intellect, innovation, and doing good at a scale few people in history ever have. But reputations aren't built only on what a person creates. They're shaped by the choices they make when no one is supposed to be watching. And for Gates, no matter what good his charitable work does, those choices are now part of his legacy. Stories like this show how tricky it can be to figure out what to believe and who to believe. I'm a big believer in strengthening how we think. That's why I love using Brilliant, a website and app that helps you build your logic skills while also improving your math and coding skills through interactive lessons. One course I really like is Truth and Lies, which sharpens your deductive reasoning so you can think more clearly instead of just reacting. You can also strengthen your math skills with lessons that feel more like puzzles than lectures by starting at a level that's comfortable for you and building your way up from there. If you're interested in coding, Brilliant lets you learn with step-by-step interactive lessons. You can start learning for free for 30 days at brilliant.org slash newsthink or by scanning the QR code on your screen. Brilliant is also giving you 20% off an annual premium subscription, giving you unlimited access to thousands of lessons. Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I'm Cindy Pom.