Bill And Melinda Gates Have Finalized Their Divorce
Bill and Melinda Gates have finalized their divorce
After a judge approved their divorce on Monday, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates are now legally separated.
"We no longer believe we can grow together as a couple as we enter this next phase of our lives," the powerhouse couple, who met at Microsoft (MSFT) in 1987 and were married in 1994, said in May when they announced they were ending their 27-year marriage. King County, Washington, is where French Gates filed his divorce petition.
Separation contracts are not made public, so the couple's divorce agreement is kept under wraps. According to court documents filed Monday, neither party will be responsible for spousal support. Financial information is not included in the documents that have been made public.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as of Monday, Gates' net worth was approximately $152 billion, which means that he and French Gates could each be worth approximately $76 billion following the dissolution of their union.
According to court documents, French Gates has no intention of changing her name.
Aftermath of their divorce
In their initial divorce announcement, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had an endowment of approximately $50 billion at the time of the divorce announcement, stated that they would continue to jointly run the charity. A trial period of two years was announced by the foundation last month to determine whether or not the two organizations could continue to work effectively together after that.
In the event that they are unable to continue to work together as co-chairs after two years, CEO Mark Suzman stated that French Gates would resign from her positions as co-chair and trustee.
Assuming that occurs, Gates would retain control of the foundation and would effectively buy her out of it, according to Suzman. French In exchange for her philanthropic work, Gates would receive "personal resources" from Gates — resources that would be "completely separate from the foundation's endowment."
After his divorce was announced, Gates was subjected to allegations of questionable workplace behavior during his early years at Microsoft, which emerged in the weeks following the announcement. (In a statement to the New York Times, a Gates spokesperson called many of the allegations "untrue," and CNN was unable to independently verify the reports.)
Microsoft's board of directors hired a law firm to investigate a romantic relationship Gates had with a Microsoft employee two decades earlier, the Wall Street Journal reported in May. Gates resigned from the company's board in 2020 after the board hired the law firm. Representatives for Gates acknowledged the relationship, but insisted that his removal from the board of directors was unrelated to the relationship. Immediately following the report, current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that the company's culture had changed, adding that "the Microsoft of 2021 is very different from the Microsoft that existed in 2000."
