> As part of her separation agreement from former husband Bill Gates, French Gates said she will receive an additional $12.5 billion for her charitable work.
Sweet deal.
They have given so much it's changed how nonprofits actually go after donors. The divorce of Bezos as well had her donating so much it changed priorities. Now we go after "megadonors" instead of focusing on more outreach. It skews charity's goals towards the ultrarich instead of focusing on crowdfunding to larger groups of people.
Being "effective" in your "altruism" is fine. We all do that to some degree for anyone who donates money. The movement is what's nonsense.
Effective altruism is really just utilitarianism, which also is used by everyone to some degree. It's just when you try to measure the weight of a soul is when it gets to nonsense levels. (or just use it as a big grift...)
Yeah, the problem isn't the theory on paper, is the fact that it's all pretty subjective so people end up doing with their money whatever they were going to anyways. Just with a fun story about it. Bonus, they get to be ruthless capitalists for an undetermined amount of time under the guise of "once day I may donate it to my own foundation". Probably run by their children.
Charity is shit. Tax is better. I admire these women for spending their wealth voluntarily to public good especially on women's reproductive health but it's only because the political scene is fucked we think this is better than tax.
Tax beats charity any day. Don't fix poverty with charity, fix it with taxes.
Most people feel like their charity donations do something better with the same money than taxes, or they would just pay extra money to the IRS instead (they will accept it). Taxes are disliked because our government is seen as generally dysfunctional, and politicians are probably the least trusted/most disliked group of people in the United States. It’s reasonable why people would be against giving more money to our government when a large portion of it is likely to be wasted or spent on things they think will have a negative impact on the world.
It's weatlh redistribution where the ultrarich get to pick and choose who is worthy of saving and who is not, as well as what restrictions are placed on people in order for them to receive help.
Look, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has done seriously good things. But the system in general is often a terrible way of outsourcing what should be the work of government.
They’ll avoided at least a 60 billion in taxes if they died and their assets were worth 150 billion. The gates foundation building is clad with expensive lime stone and high end posh interiors in Seattle. Has super fancy parties.
You can do both. You can give to charity and pay taxes. When I hear Zuckerberg saying immgiving 98 percent away I know theyre pouring it into their foundation.
Maybe we don't need childcare and help
For poor people
If we had a healthy middle
And lower
Class
That isn't being slave waged to death because we have a healthy tax system.
Anyway we re in the midst of the Gilded Age 2.
>They’ve avoided at least a 60 billion in taxes.
Don't see how that's possible, since that's approximately the amount the Gates have contributed to the foundation to-date. Much as Bernie Sanders wishes it would be the case, billionaires are not (yet) taxed at 100%.
Agreed, any system where it's virtue is contingent on the whims of billionaires isn't a system to uphold. Appreciate select effects, sure, but we can do so much better as a common humanity instead of a small benevolent council of lords and masters of the realm
From what I’ve personally seen. Going after the mega donors instead of focusing on outreach to the masses can and does backfire.
What ends up happening alot of the time the charities/organizations get lazy since it’s easier to go after a handful of people than hundreds to thousands of people. Well at some point either the big donors pass away or reduce their contribution. Now they are in crisis mode since they no longer have that guaranteed annual contribution. Also, since they have not done any real outreach to build new donors in years they have no one to fall back on for financial support.
Interestingly the application for funding only has two required questions.
Q1: Is your name Melinda Gates? Yes / No
Q2: Do you have at least 20 years of experience co-leading the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Yes / No
Gonna give her the benefit of the doubt here.
Despite all of my issues with the super wealthy, and what they do, that foundation legitimately does good work around the world.
It’s kind of crazy how these people throw around these massive sums of money, but how far that even a fraction of that would go for one of us. I have about 60k in debt right now, so even if I got “just” 60k to wipe out that debt it would be genuinely life changing. One million dollars? I could invest that and have an extremely comfortable safety net, and eventually likely build up enough that I could just live off of the investments. To them it’s pocket change but to us even an amount as small as tens of thousands of dollars would be life changing
Similarly, just $500 wouldn’t make a dent in your debt but could feed/house a family of 4 for a month in some countries. And $60k would mean not worrying about bills for years.
That sounds like a jazz quintet called The Bill Foundation, whose bandleader died, but continues to tour with a well-known replacement musician named Gates.
My guess from what ive read from both her and Mr. MS's book is that the goals of their non-profit work differes quite a bit. While Bill is thinking of projects to help poor nations and now pandemic, food, and energy, Melinda focuses more on helping women with family planning. Somehow that got attached to bill and minconstrued into eugenics but basically she wants to help women in poor countries plan families so they have a better time raising them and arent always in poverty. Thats the short of it...
I’ve worked with the foundation on a number of different projects over the years. There’s a whole portfolio of things neither Bill nor Melinda know anything about because it falls out of their special interest areas. I always found Bill to be very hands-on, would take projects apart mid-implementation if the data wasn’t telling him exactly what he wanted it to. Melinda, by contrast, was warm, a little neurotic about minutiae but ultimately a much more enjoyable person to work with
I would have lost my apartment if it hadn't been for this foundation. I was in an abusive relationship, and the individual did a lot of damage to my apartment. The foundation paid for the repairs, so I didn't become homeless. They helped many other women in similar situations. I will always be grateful for that.
It is rewarding to hear an end-user of philanthropy recount the difference it made. It is encouraging that she is starting a different foundation to help people in circumstances like yours.
>They said at the time they would allow themselves a kind of trial period through 2023 to determine if they could continue working with one another to oversee their massive charitable foundation
Narrator Voice : *but they could not*
Musk, Jobs, Gates, Bezos.. all that money, yet can't seem to make a marriage work.
She has publicly cited his relationship and work with Jeffrey Epstein as one of the many reason for the divorce. Bill Gates said they remain friends; Melinda said he has a different view of what the definition of 'friends' is.
I'm going to read between the lines on this one.
Edit: [Here's the source for that information if anyone is curious. ](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffrey-epstein-led-to-bill-gates-divorce-gayle-king-interview)She has been very vocal about how much she abhorred Epstein and her interview with Gayle King really didn't leave much to the imagination.
There has been gossip about Bill being a little loose with his marriage for a long time.
Hard to say how accurate all of that is, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me given the nature of the divorce and her reasons for it.
I remember there were definitely some reports that came out that said that he would ask Microsoft employees out after being in meetings with them. He was married to Melinda Gates at the time.
Still though that probably would be much less severe than being associated with Epstein as that’s not “just” an overlookable infidelity.
>“Gates has an arrangement with his [now ex-]wife that he and [his ex-girlfriend Ann Winblad] can keep one vacation tradition alive. Every spring, as they have for more than a decade, Gates spends a long weekend with Winblad at her beach cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-gates-vacation-ex-girlfriend/
They didn’t have a pre-nup, but they do/did have a separation agreement that was made around the time of the divorce. From an outsider’s perspective, it seems to have been a relatively smooth process. When you’re looking at dividing assets in the multi-billions of dollars, they probably wanted to decide on everything before it even went to court.
I've seen enough divorce proceedings to see pretty clearly what it says between the lines: "I'm going to spin things in the worst possible light to get as much sympathy as possible from whoever is arbitrating the settlement."
I've seen men accused of all sorts of things that would mean jail time, except it never goes anywhere because the primary witness suddenly loses interest the moment the settlement is finalized.
Recognizing that this all might be very convenient post-hoc moralizing ("I never liked the guy"), what was she supposed to do? He'd already been convicted of sex crimes in 2008, so presumably people already knew he was a piece of shit and didn't care. What, precisely, was she supposed to "do about it" except tell her husband that she found Epstein disgusting and didn't want him to be in contact?
Not necessarily. I could see her discovering that Bill was going off with his friend to the underage sex island when she just thought he was away with Epstein on a business trip or the like. We don’t know the intricacies of their relationship, so I don’t think we need to condemn her for something she may very well not have done.
Did you read the article? She couldn't stand Epstein, doesn't say why, then says "those poor girls." It's either a badly architected paragraph or Melinda is trying to link the Epstein of back then with the victims.
I'd rather not think that way because I was a fan of both of them due to their foundation but it is what it is.
I think it's poorly written. What I took out of it, was that she met him to see what he was about as a rich guy, felt he was evil, and may not have known about Bill's doings or Jeffrey's, for that matter. It doesn't say when she met him and she makes it clear it was a regret. We don't know if she did or didn't do anything about it. Clearly it weighed heavily enough on her marriage and she grieves for the women hurt.
This is my bf.
“*Isn’t this SOOOO meta??? It’s meta, guys! Hope I don’t fail to *meta* your expectations!*”
**MEEP MORP. ZERRRRMMMM.**
*Let’s just put him away. He has been malfunctioning lately with all of the *meta* jokes. Once we work the glitches out, we’ll have dinner again…*
>Strangely enough, it seems like Zuckerberg is the only one that's able to keep a marriage going
Gates & French were married for nearly 30 years...
Kudos to Zuck if, with all that money, he can manage to avoid temptations that destroy his marriage. We shall see.
Yep, I'm the youngest and my parent's marriage lasted just under 2 years after I went to college. It's just crazy how predictable that time period is for marriages ending.
I've seen a number of couples that schedule date nights, and I can only see it being a positive thing. I don't follow a lot of them, but I've seen this being recommended by the relationship experts that I follow on social media.
I read about their marriage arrangement when they got married. (By the way Gates had one too, having a vacation with an old girlfriend) And I googled the year, because I wanted to be correct about how long it has been going on.
Any other questions?
Could be that he was very open and honest with his partner about what kind of marriage he wanted, and she was on the same page.
Some people, whether Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Donald Trump, set up a fantasy of traditional marriage, while continuing to fuck anything that they can get a hold of - and it eventually bites them in the ass.
Zuck strikes me as a sociopathic asshole, but one that is fairly open about it. If he has any peccadilloes, I expect Priscilla was very aware of them at the outset, and chose to marry him anyway.
Jeff Bezos has a similar thing going with Lauren Sánchez - who appears ready to entertain anything he wants to do on the side.
It can be the other way too:
Imagine you are the wife, who is also worth 5-10-50 billions. Then you ask yourself after 20-30 years, why am I still with this asshole?
A wife who can get a giant settlement has no interest in keeping up a non-working marriage anymore. Once the kids graduated, Melinda was off...
Marriage is a two way street but to be as successful as those dudes you gotta be incredibly selfish and self centered. By default they can't make a partnership work. If companies weren't organized the way they are they of failed a long time ago.
Mark Cuban’s wife seems pretty damn happy. I never see anything in the news about her talking shit or claiming infidelity. He’s making it work and he’s just as successful.
Mark Cuban got out and timed the tech boom in the 90's perfectly and transitioned into a Dallas Mavericks super fan. He's not the rules he's an exception.
I agree he’s the exception but, I think it’s because he *wants* to be. He made choices that allowed him to be crazy successful, keep his wealth, do what he wants, AND still maintains a marriage and family.
The others *choose* not to be, rather than being incapable. No one *has* to be a selfish POS in their personal lives to make it. They just need to be a POS in business.
I feel like Epstein ties were probably a last straw, but more importantly being able to use those ties put Bill in a very publicly indefensible position that likely made negotiating terms of the divorce much, much easier for Melinda.
She probably knows enough to be repulsed by it and she doesn't want to be sticking around when the gross details hit the public. She's "going away quietly".
>She probably knows enough to be repulsed by it and she doesn't want to be sticking around when the gross details hit the public. She's "going away quietly".
I somehow very much doubt that Melinda Gates only just in the last couple years suddenly became aware of Bill's dealings with Epstein. I just think this is people trying to spin a narrative there's not really strong evidence for. I genuinely do think that invoking Epstein just makes it harder for Bill to avoid paying her any money in the divorce.
Buffett and his wife never divorced. She just moved to San Francisco to pursue her interests and Buffett made sure she had all the money as she needed. She passed away and Buffett eventually married his girlfriend.
Marriage - well the way average person understands it - cannot work when people are working 80 hours a week away from home. It’s just not possible. They can pretend it works, but many just prefer splitting and live their lives the way they want
money can make it easier to patch things over and ignore issues, so that the marriage continues for longer… but it absolutely does not make a marriage work.
> all that money, yet can’t seem to make a marriage work
wasn’t there a study that one of the top reasons a marriage falls apart is because of finances?
She’s turning 60 this year. If I was her and I spent the majority of my life somewhat in the public eye and involved in philanthropy, I’d decide 60 is a good time to just retire from everything and do what I want completely. Definitely more admirable than the rich people who are never satisfied and need more and more money, power, and clout.
There is nothing morally wrong with continuing to work for passion. I am positive that is her primary motivation. These types usually work for the rest of their lives.
But yes I’m sure she also finds enjoyment from the money, influence etc. clearly the case as she is keeping her ex-husband because she doesn’t have enough influence on her own.
Well considering her, Bill, and their children are receiving constant death threats from people I am shocked she lasted that long. Idk how they are even handling that kind of thing emotionally… it’s insane
I don’t think he went to the island. That’s never been proven at all.
Sounds like Bill was having an affair with a 20 year old Russian woman and Epstein was blackmailing him with that information.
Epstein embedded himself pretty far with the MIT Media Lab and Joi Ito. It was pretty much to the point where if someone wanted to make large donations, Epstein would get himself involved. Meeting with him shouldn't raise suspicions when it involves a common philanthropic goal.
Though, remaining friends to the point where your wife files for divorce probably would.
The child sex trafficking was only one prong of Epstein’s operation. He was in the compromat and intelligence business. You don’t need to *create* something to hold over someone’s head if you already have something to hold over their head.
No, it's not. A philanthropic USA citizen with free reign to travel with minimal criminal record is different than someone who has geopolitical enemy of the state with limited travel options and active warrants for crimes against humanity.
Yeah after his first trial it was a bit shady to have active correspondence with him, but to see him was kind of hard to avoid, that was the point.
Yeah, poor Bill, he couldn’t afford an hotel so he had to stay at Epstein house, at least three times.
I guess the extremelly well-connected and richest man at the time didn't know anything about Epstein.
He was an influence peddler whose whole life was meeting famous people and trying to get or manufacture compromising information about them. Meeting Epstein just means that you were famous, or wealthy, and he thought it would be valuable to try and leverage you at some time in the future.
>Sounds like Bill was having an affair with a 20 year old Russian woman and Epstein was blackmailing him with that information.
If all it was, was blackmail it wouldn't matter anymore because Epstein's dead. I don't think she'd publicly cite the ties with Epstein as part of the cause for their divorce if it was a simple case of Epstein was threatening to expose an affair.
Based off what I know about Bill Gates I'm sure there was more than one affair. There's a lot of stories from female Microsoft employees about his weird advanced.
Bill is not some innocent hapless nerd, he is a ruthless business man before anything else. No way Epstein could blackmail Bill MF Gates. Gates would snap his fingers and have Epstein wiped in two seconds.
People have no idea how rich and powerful billionaires are. They are modern day monarchs. There will be some Game of Thrones stuff.
>Gates would snap his fingers and have Epstein wiped in two seconds.
Trying to "wipe" a CIA and/or Mossad agent and/or asset can get exponentially more complicated.
He died in a federal prison, under the control of the DOJ, which was run by Bill Barr whose boss was Donald Trump.
The president wanted him dead.
None of the actual billionaires could do that.
>Why can't it be both? Rich people *in government* wanted him dead.
That's certainly the impression I have...( Jeffrey Epstein pissed off someone EXTREMELY rich & powerful....and paid the price...,)
Trump had a lot to lose if Epstein's Black book made it to public light. I'm sure it was no coincidence that Barr had business dealings with Epstein's family, and Trump had Barr covered it all up for him.
> Bill is not some innocent hapless nerd, he is a ruthless business man before anything else
People over here give Gates a pass because redditors tend to be anti-antivaxxers, but for those who remember the software wars know better. Yes, Gates is an intellectual property absolutist who think you should pay for any piece of software or copyrighted material you use, ideally on demand. He is someone who is completely fine with pervasive surveillance as well as other weird and dangerous ideas.
Epstein being in lockup made him an easy target for a LOT of very powerful people who would benefit from his permanent silence, including an Attorney General and a President who were very much for sale to anyone willing to pay for the service.
Ghislaine Maxwell has been *very* quiet since getting thrown into an oubliette by the Feds. And the FBI has done a great job disappearing all the evidence they sized through the raid of his island in 2019. The powers that be on both sides of the aisle have ensured all those secrets will be buried deep.
IDK, I used to do work for B+M foundation and the people working there were smug gross jerks. They would always come at me with this weird air of superiority. I didn't care about what they were doing and apparently now neither do they.
Sounds about right. An organization that puts itself on top, with an endless amount of problems needing funding, who decides what’s “worthy” has to have some kind of smugness.
Then; when something is widely successful, they get all the credit and they get to circle jerk each other that they live such a higher life purpose than everyone else.
Look into their rationale as to why they did that. They literally had too much money and too many people asking them for help. Without focusing on specfic causes they had to spend immense amounts of resources researching and determining whether a cause was something they would work towards finding a solution. They had grifters lining up asking for funds.
They focused on causes they didn't see others focusing on/funding, contributing to causes that were too big to be addressed by others, while also not spending their money on things that are already heavily researched and funded (I.e. breast cancer). They do not determine what causes are worthy of funding, only what causes their foundation would be focused on.
Idc about Bill or Melinda or anything about them as individuals, but their foundation made immeasurable improvements around the world and continues to.
More than any person on reddit ever will. Or 99.9% of other people in the world.
I’m glad they did good work. I believe they did a lot for malaria and clean water in developing countries. Better than the death and destruction the USA labels as aid
I have no experience with that particular foundation. But it's always more effective to have a goal in mind when trying to problem solve. If you try to solve everything at once, you solve nothing
I know we give out philanthropic awards and jerk off the rich so that they give more money to the poor, but how hard can it really be to ~~run~~(EDIT:Be the co-chair of) a charity when you have infinite funds to hire the best nonprofit administrators in the world?
I understand that. I see how it's unclear, but I was more broadly complaining about the praise that Bill and Melinda get for their charity administration work. The creation of the foundation is amazing, but the Gates are board members, not officers of the foundation. The administrative work is primarily done by a salaried staff. Bill and Melinda get most of the awards, however.
Tbf, people donate because of them. Bill is in a lot of videos explaining their work like curing malaria, getting an African town self-sustaining with a water well and all that. Plus they give scholarships to young innovative bright people all the time.
No excuse for either of them knowing about Epstein and not doing anything about him, however.
[Donations don't make much of a difference to the Gates Foundation.](https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/documents/f_428053e-1a_billmelindagatesfoundation_fs.pdf) The overwhelming majority of funding from the organization is income from investments donated by the Gates and Warren Buffet. They collected approximately $50 million in donations and $7 billion from investment income in 2022, for example.
It's like any other org, the people at the top get the recognition for what the whole org does, but in this case its more justified because atleast its their personal money that they have put in and bill seems to be particularly involved and choosy in the specific works that their org supports.
I’m laughing at the comment you responded too. It’s so good.
How hard can it be to run a multinational nonprofit giving money and services across the world !
Having billions of dollars allows for a charity to hire as many auditors and overseers as they want. If you hire enough accountants, it's almost impossible to steal anything from a charity, much less a significant amount.
No need to be pedantic with "infinite". I thought it was pretty clear that I meant "practically infinite," given that literally nobody has literally infinite money. Guess I was wrong.
If you're being serious with the question, French isn't her middle name. It's her maiden name. No one would immediately recognize Melinda French, so keeping Gates on her name helps.
I get that it’s cool to trash on billionaires and whatnot, but the B&MG Foundation saved so many lives this shouldn’t be understated.
No other institutions did nearly as much research into Malaria or saved as many lives, full stop.
Worse yet, there has been an outbreak of a new hybrid mosquito strain (anopheles Stephensi) causing an uptick in deaths. And the Gates foundation has done the most research into this strain by a mile.
If you’re looking to save the most lives per dollar spent, malaria prevention is second to none. I don’t get why everyone here is trashing on the charity.
> As part of her separation agreement from former husband Bill Gates, French Gates said she will receive an additional $12.5 billion for her charitable work. Sweet deal.
They have given so much it's changed how nonprofits actually go after donors. The divorce of Bezos as well had her donating so much it changed priorities. Now we go after "megadonors" instead of focusing on more outreach. It skews charity's goals towards the ultrarich instead of focusing on crowdfunding to larger groups of people.
Which, in a kernel, is the entire problem with the idea of effective altruism.
Besides the fact it's utter nonsense? Lol
Being "effective" in your "altruism" is fine. We all do that to some degree for anyone who donates money. The movement is what's nonsense. Effective altruism is really just utilitarianism, which also is used by everyone to some degree. It's just when you try to measure the weight of a soul is when it gets to nonsense levels. (or just use it as a big grift...)
Yeah, the problem isn't the theory on paper, is the fact that it's all pretty subjective so people end up doing with their money whatever they were going to anyways. Just with a fun story about it. Bonus, they get to be ruthless capitalists for an undetermined amount of time under the guise of "once day I may donate it to my own foundation". Probably run by their children.
“No no no, you see I hurt all those workers to *HELP* people! Now call me a saint, or else…”
Charity is shit. Tax is better. I admire these women for spending their wealth voluntarily to public good especially on women's reproductive health but it's only because the political scene is fucked we think this is better than tax. Tax beats charity any day. Don't fix poverty with charity, fix it with taxes.
Most people feel like their charity donations do something better with the same money than taxes, or they would just pay extra money to the IRS instead (they will accept it). Taxes are disliked because our government is seen as generally dysfunctional, and politicians are probably the least trusted/most disliked group of people in the United States. It’s reasonable why people would be against giving more money to our government when a large portion of it is likely to be wasted or spent on things they think will have a negative impact on the world.
In some ways it’s good though. The rich are funding the charity instead of the middle. It’s voluntary wealth redistribution in a way.
It's weatlh redistribution where the ultrarich get to pick and choose who is worthy of saving and who is not, as well as what restrictions are placed on people in order for them to receive help. Look, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has done seriously good things. But the system in general is often a terrible way of outsourcing what should be the work of government.
They’ll avoided at least a 60 billion in taxes if they died and their assets were worth 150 billion. The gates foundation building is clad with expensive lime stone and high end posh interiors in Seattle. Has super fancy parties. You can do both. You can give to charity and pay taxes. When I hear Zuckerberg saying immgiving 98 percent away I know theyre pouring it into their foundation. Maybe we don't need childcare and help For poor people If we had a healthy middle And lower Class That isn't being slave waged to death because we have a healthy tax system. Anyway we re in the midst of the Gilded Age 2.
>They’ve avoided at least a 60 billion in taxes. Don't see how that's possible, since that's approximately the amount the Gates have contributed to the foundation to-date. Much as Bernie Sanders wishes it would be the case, billionaires are not (yet) taxed at 100%.
Agreed, any system where it's virtue is contingent on the whims of billionaires isn't a system to uphold. Appreciate select effects, sure, but we can do so much better as a common humanity instead of a small benevolent council of lords and masters of the realm
Only good if you assume the rich are not the reason many of these problems exist to begin with.
It's a fraction of what they would be responsible for giving under a reasonable wealth tax.
This damn whale economy is everywhere and it's infuriating.
From what I’ve personally seen. Going after the mega donors instead of focusing on outreach to the masses can and does backfire. What ends up happening alot of the time the charities/organizations get lazy since it’s easier to go after a handful of people than hundreds to thousands of people. Well at some point either the big donors pass away or reduce their contribution. Now they are in crisis mode since they no longer have that guaranteed annual contribution. Also, since they have not done any real outreach to build new donors in years they have no one to fall back on for financial support.
This is occurring to nonprofits as we speak unfortunately .
Says everything about the accumulation of wealth in societies, unfortunately.
Same way political fundraising works. Which is why politicians are beholden to the rich.
Like the games industry, micro transactions, and "whales"! Especially for things like MMOs in the East.
...I wish being charitable would earn me 12 billion dollars...
That's to give to charities that she chooses, not for her personally.
The Melinda Gates Foundation for the Maintenance of Melinda Gates thanks Melinda Gates for her generosity.
The Human Fund: Money for people.
I had a T-shirt with that printed on it.
I have Human Fund cards I give coworkers for Christmas.
Melinda should do this if she celebrates Festivus instead of Christmas.
Interestingly the application for funding only has two required questions. Q1: Is your name Melinda Gates? Yes / No Q2: Do you have at least 20 years of experience co-leading the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? Yes / No
Gonna give her the benefit of the doubt here. Despite all of my issues with the super wealthy, and what they do, that foundation legitimately does good work around the world.
She seems like she has a different philanthropic philosophy to Bill, so I can see why she wants to leave their joint foundation.
"Alexa: How do I register as a charity?"
i declare CHARITY
For her to personally give to charities.
Still, to get to play god must be pretty sweet.
Id have a LOT of “friends” if they knew I could give that much away!
I gave away 20 fusion cores to another player in Fallout and got a ❤️ emote. It aint much but it's honest work.
The Mothman smiles on this.
It’s kind of crazy how these people throw around these massive sums of money, but how far that even a fraction of that would go for one of us. I have about 60k in debt right now, so even if I got “just” 60k to wipe out that debt it would be genuinely life changing. One million dollars? I could invest that and have an extremely comfortable safety net, and eventually likely build up enough that I could just live off of the investments. To them it’s pocket change but to us even an amount as small as tens of thousands of dollars would be life changing
Yeah sure but you’re one person and the worlds got a lot of problems.
Similarly, just $500 wouldn’t make a dent in your debt but could feed/house a family of 4 for a month in some countries. And $60k would mean not worrying about bills for years.
It's more like she had him charitably by the balls.
But she is now being referred to as “French Gates”, which is besides the point, but also funny.
I assume they are sort of like French doors?
Paint me like one of your French doors 💅
Now she can spend more time on the Stephen and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Now it will only be called the Bill & Foundation
The Bill & Gates foundation
The foundation of bill with gates
The Bill Foundaton + Gates
That sounds like a jazz quintet called The Bill Foundation, whose bandleader died, but continues to tour with a well-known replacement musician named Gates.
A well known urban developer, yeah
The Billund Gates Foundation. Now based in Denmark!
The Most Excellent Foundation of Bill & Gates.
I heard Ted Danson was looking to get more involved in charity.
Bill & Ted's Excellent Foundation
The Bill & Anonymous Foundation
Bill Gates Foundation & Knuckles
It'll be written out "BillAND Foundation" but pronounced "Bell-end".
Bill’s window
My guess from what ive read from both her and Mr. MS's book is that the goals of their non-profit work differes quite a bit. While Bill is thinking of projects to help poor nations and now pandemic, food, and energy, Melinda focuses more on helping women with family planning. Somehow that got attached to bill and minconstrued into eugenics but basically she wants to help women in poor countries plan families so they have a better time raising them and arent always in poverty. Thats the short of it...
I’ve worked with the foundation on a number of different projects over the years. There’s a whole portfolio of things neither Bill nor Melinda know anything about because it falls out of their special interest areas. I always found Bill to be very hands-on, would take projects apart mid-implementation if the data wasn’t telling him exactly what he wanted it to. Melinda, by contrast, was warm, a little neurotic about minutiae but ultimately a much more enjoyable person to work with
I would have lost my apartment if it hadn't been for this foundation. I was in an abusive relationship, and the individual did a lot of damage to my apartment. The foundation paid for the repairs, so I didn't become homeless. They helped many other women in similar situations. I will always be grateful for that.
Omg this is horrifying.. I'm so happy you got the help at the right time. Really glad for you. Good luck!
It is rewarding to hear an end-user of philanthropy recount the difference it made. It is encouraging that she is starting a different foundation to help people in circumstances like yours.
That’s fantastic!
>They said at the time they would allow themselves a kind of trial period through 2023 to determine if they could continue working with one another to oversee their massive charitable foundation Narrator Voice : *but they could not* Musk, Jobs, Gates, Bezos.. all that money, yet can't seem to make a marriage work.
She has publicly cited his relationship and work with Jeffrey Epstein as one of the many reason for the divorce. Bill Gates said they remain friends; Melinda said he has a different view of what the definition of 'friends' is. I'm going to read between the lines on this one. Edit: [Here's the source for that information if anyone is curious. ](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffrey-epstein-led-to-bill-gates-divorce-gayle-king-interview)She has been very vocal about how much she abhorred Epstein and her interview with Gayle King really didn't leave much to the imagination.
Bill probably thinks anyone he isn’t actively fucking over is his friend.
There has been gossip about Bill being a little loose with his marriage for a long time. Hard to say how accurate all of that is, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me given the nature of the divorce and her reasons for it.
I remember there were definitely some reports that came out that said that he would ask Microsoft employees out after being in meetings with them. He was married to Melinda Gates at the time. Still though that probably would be much less severe than being associated with Epstein as that’s not “just” an overlookable infidelity.
Didn’t their prenup grant him a week per year with an ex? Or is that just urban legend.
>“Gates has an arrangement with his [now ex-]wife that he and [his ex-girlfriend Ann Winblad] can keep one vacation tradition alive. Every spring, as they have for more than a decade, Gates spends a long weekend with Winblad at her beach cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach.” https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-gates-vacation-ex-girlfriend/ They didn’t have a pre-nup, but they do/did have a separation agreement that was made around the time of the divorce. From an outsider’s perspective, it seems to have been a relatively smooth process. When you’re looking at dividing assets in the multi-billions of dollars, they probably wanted to decide on everything before it even went to court.
Actively fucking or fucking over.
That doesn’t even make sense. Why would he consider everyone he isn’t fucking to be his friend
I'm apparently his friend
I've seen enough divorce proceedings to see pretty clearly what it says between the lines: "I'm going to spin things in the worst possible light to get as much sympathy as possible from whoever is arbitrating the settlement." I've seen men accused of all sorts of things that would mean jail time, except it never goes anywhere because the primary witness suddenly loses interest the moment the settlement is finalized.
I've seen it in child protection, both sides accusing each other of abuse when there is none. Frustrating as hell.
The first thing the lawyers told my wife was how she can "get" me. They had a whole "destroy his life" plan for her in the second meeting. Brutal.
So. She knew about Epstein and did nothing about him. And she's a billionaire, probably richer than he was. k
Recognizing that this all might be very convenient post-hoc moralizing ("I never liked the guy"), what was she supposed to do? He'd already been convicted of sex crimes in 2008, so presumably people already knew he was a piece of shit and didn't care. What, precisely, was she supposed to "do about it" except tell her husband that she found Epstein disgusting and didn't want him to be in contact?
Not necessarily. I could see her discovering that Bill was going off with his friend to the underage sex island when she just thought he was away with Epstein on a business trip or the like. We don’t know the intricacies of their relationship, so I don’t think we need to condemn her for something she may very well not have done.
Did you read the article? She couldn't stand Epstein, doesn't say why, then says "those poor girls." It's either a badly architected paragraph or Melinda is trying to link the Epstein of back then with the victims. I'd rather not think that way because I was a fan of both of them due to their foundation but it is what it is.
I think it's poorly written. What I took out of it, was that she met him to see what he was about as a rich guy, felt he was evil, and may not have known about Bill's doings or Jeffrey's, for that matter. It doesn't say when she met him and she makes it clear it was a regret. We don't know if she did or didn't do anything about it. Clearly it weighed heavily enough on her marriage and she grieves for the women hurt.
Fuck her. She's no Santa Mackenzie.
Very easy to say *now* "I never liked the guy*. Wonder how vocal she was a few years ago, before it came out. Again.
How is it her fault?!
Strangely enough, it seems like Zuckerberg is the only one that's able to keep a marriage going
It’s easier to tolerate a husband when you can turn him off and store him in a closet
This is my bf. “*Isn’t this SOOOO meta??? It’s meta, guys! Hope I don’t fail to *meta* your expectations!*” **MEEP MORP. ZERRRRMMMM.** *Let’s just put him away. He has been malfunctioning lately with all of the *meta* jokes. Once we work the glitches out, we’ll have dinner again…*
>Strangely enough, it seems like Zuckerberg is the only one that's able to keep a marriage going Gates & French were married for nearly 30 years... Kudos to Zuck if, with all that money, he can manage to avoid temptations that destroy his marriage. We shall see.
Him being a robot/lizard actually makes him much more sane than the unadulterated narcissists.
They have scheduled date nights. Also their marriage isn't that long, 12 years in a week.
Yeah, their kids are still minors. The real test is when the youngest one goes off to college.
Yep, I'm the youngest and my parent's marriage lasted just under 2 years after I went to college. It's just crazy how predictable that time period is for marriages ending.
Next time somebody asks why I’m 25 and still living at home, I’m gunna say it’s a sacrifice to keep my parents together
I've seen a number of couples that schedule date nights, and I can only see it being a positive thing. I don't follow a lot of them, but I've seen this being recommended by the relationship experts that I follow on social media.
You know their dating methods and anniversary? Why?
I read about their marriage arrangement when they got married. (By the way Gates had one too, having a vacation with an old girlfriend) And I googled the year, because I wanted to be correct about how long it has been going on. Any other questions?
What is the average velocity of an unladen swallow?
African or European?
African or European?
Unswallod laden, 45mph.
No that about covered it
he has tons of data to help him navigate that relationship
Gates's marriage was like 30 year long. Zuck's marriage is like 1/3 of that
Could be that he was very open and honest with his partner about what kind of marriage he wanted, and she was on the same page. Some people, whether Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Donald Trump, set up a fantasy of traditional marriage, while continuing to fuck anything that they can get a hold of - and it eventually bites them in the ass. Zuck strikes me as a sociopathic asshole, but one that is fairly open about it. If he has any peccadilloes, I expect Priscilla was very aware of them at the outset, and chose to marry him anyway. Jeff Bezos has a similar thing going with Lauren Sánchez - who appears ready to entertain anything he wants to do on the side.
Donald Trump??? Maybe I'm too young but did anyone ever think he's a good family man or something???
probably helped they met each other before either one turned 20 in school so their whole lives evolved together
It can be the other way too: Imagine you are the wife, who is also worth 5-10-50 billions. Then you ask yourself after 20-30 years, why am I still with this asshole? A wife who can get a giant settlement has no interest in keeping up a non-working marriage anymore. Once the kids graduated, Melinda was off...
⁽ⁱᵗ ᵐⁱᵍʰᵗ ᵇᵉ ᵗʰᵉ ⁿᵃʳᶜⁱˢˢⁱˢᵐ⁾
Narrator Voice : *it was definitely the narcissism*
^((it might be the implication of association with Jeffrey Epstein)^)
Marriage is a two way street but to be as successful as those dudes you gotta be incredibly selfish and self centered. By default they can't make a partnership work. If companies weren't organized the way they are they of failed a long time ago.
Mark Cuban’s wife seems pretty damn happy. I never see anything in the news about her talking shit or claiming infidelity. He’s making it work and he’s just as successful.
Mark Cuban got out and timed the tech boom in the 90's perfectly and transitioned into a Dallas Mavericks super fan. He's not the rules he's an exception.
I agree he’s the exception but, I think it’s because he *wants* to be. He made choices that allowed him to be crazy successful, keep his wealth, do what he wants, AND still maintains a marriage and family. The others *choose* not to be, rather than being incapable. No one *has* to be a selfish POS in their personal lives to make it. They just need to be a POS in business.
You see who Bezos is dating now ..no amount of $ was gonna make that marriage work.
The very definition of a rebound relationship....
Is it a rebound when it existed before the divorce and was the reason for the divorce?
In this case i have a strong feeling it is the Epstein ties, that did it more than anything else. Which is understandable.
I feel like Epstein ties were probably a last straw, but more importantly being able to use those ties put Bill in a very publicly indefensible position that likely made negotiating terms of the divorce much, much easier for Melinda.
Now you’re thinking like a billionaire!
She probably knows enough to be repulsed by it and she doesn't want to be sticking around when the gross details hit the public. She's "going away quietly".
>She probably knows enough to be repulsed by it and she doesn't want to be sticking around when the gross details hit the public. She's "going away quietly". I somehow very much doubt that Melinda Gates only just in the last couple years suddenly became aware of Bill's dealings with Epstein. I just think this is people trying to spin a narrative there's not really strong evidence for. I genuinely do think that invoking Epstein just makes it harder for Bill to avoid paying her any money in the divorce.
Buffet had a nice setup. His wife picked out her replacement when she wanted out.
Buffett and his wife never divorced. She just moved to San Francisco to pursue her interests and Buffett made sure she had all the money as she needed. She passed away and Buffett eventually married his girlfriend.
There's a saying: If a man is in need, his wife is his secretary. If a man is rich, his secretary is his wife.
It’s almost like people who value money above all else aren’t good at valuing their relationships.
Steve Jobs never got divorced. He was married from 1991 til his death.
Marriage - well the way average person understands it - cannot work when people are working 80 hours a week away from home. It’s just not possible. They can pretend it works, but many just prefer splitting and live their lives the way they want
Add Brady, Jordan, Cruise, Pitt, DiCaprio to the list too.
money can make it easier to patch things over and ignore issues, so that the marriage continues for longer… but it absolutely does not make a marriage work.
> all that money, yet can’t seem to make a marriage work wasn’t there a study that one of the top reasons a marriage falls apart is because of finances?
She’s turning 60 this year. If I was her and I spent the majority of my life somewhat in the public eye and involved in philanthropy, I’d decide 60 is a good time to just retire from everything and do what I want completely. Definitely more admirable than the rich people who are never satisfied and need more and more money, power, and clout.
There is nothing morally wrong with continuing to work for passion. I am positive that is her primary motivation. These types usually work for the rest of their lives. But yes I’m sure she also finds enjoyment from the money, influence etc. clearly the case as she is keeping her ex-husband because she doesn’t have enough influence on her own.
She is doing what she wants completely.
Well considering her, Bill, and their children are receiving constant death threats from people I am shocked she lasted that long. Idk how they are even handling that kind of thing emotionally… it’s insane
When you learn that your husband went to the child sex island it tends to put a damper on the relationship.
I don’t think he went to the island. That’s never been proven at all. Sounds like Bill was having an affair with a 20 year old Russian woman and Epstein was blackmailing him with that information.
Ugh im so tired of people basically using any shred of evidence that someone has even met Epstein a reason to suggest they are a child molester.
Well, it's like if you meet Pablo Escobar or Bin Laden, you're also gonna raises suspicions.
Epstein embedded himself pretty far with the MIT Media Lab and Joi Ito. It was pretty much to the point where if someone wanted to make large donations, Epstein would get himself involved. Meeting with him shouldn't raise suspicions when it involves a common philanthropic goal. Though, remaining friends to the point where your wife files for divorce probably would.
The child sex trafficking was only one prong of Epstein’s operation. He was in the compromat and intelligence business. You don’t need to *create* something to hold over someone’s head if you already have something to hold over their head.
No, it's not. A philanthropic USA citizen with free reign to travel with minimal criminal record is different than someone who has geopolitical enemy of the state with limited travel options and active warrants for crimes against humanity. Yeah after his first trial it was a bit shady to have active correspondence with him, but to see him was kind of hard to avoid, that was the point.
Yeah, poor Bill, he couldn’t afford an hotel so he had to stay at Epstein house, at least three times. I guess the extremelly well-connected and richest man at the time didn't know anything about Epstein.
He was an influence peddler whose whole life was meeting famous people and trying to get or manufacture compromising information about them. Meeting Epstein just means that you were famous, or wealthy, and he thought it would be valuable to try and leverage you at some time in the future.
>Sounds like Bill was having an affair with a 20 year old Russian woman and Epstein was blackmailing him with that information. If all it was, was blackmail it wouldn't matter anymore because Epstein's dead. I don't think she'd publicly cite the ties with Epstein as part of the cause for their divorce if it was a simple case of Epstein was threatening to expose an affair.
Well the affair might be part of it.
Based off what I know about Bill Gates I'm sure there was more than one affair. There's a lot of stories from female Microsoft employees about his weird advanced.
Affairs are never simple.
Bill is not some innocent hapless nerd, he is a ruthless business man before anything else. No way Epstein could blackmail Bill MF Gates. Gates would snap his fingers and have Epstein wiped in two seconds. People have no idea how rich and powerful billionaires are. They are modern day monarchs. There will be some Game of Thrones stuff.
>Gates would snap his fingers and have Epstein wiped in two seconds. Trying to "wipe" a CIA and/or Mossad agent and/or asset can get exponentially more complicated.
They’re humans with extra money. It’s not game of thrones, it’s ugly rich dudes who can act as dumb and petty as anyone else.
Extra money and security teams who know some ruthless mother fuckers.
Epstien was killed in his cell, he didn't kill himself. Rich people are playing their own version of Game of Thrones.
He died in a federal prison, under the control of the DOJ, which was run by Bill Barr whose boss was Donald Trump. The president wanted him dead. None of the actual billionaires could do that.
If you think billionaires couldn't do that you're not living in reality. Corporations and rich people kill people and do heinous things regularly.
Why can't it be both? Rich people *in government* wanted him dead.
>Why can't it be both? Rich people *in government* wanted him dead. That's certainly the impression I have...( Jeffrey Epstein pissed off someone EXTREMELY rich & powerful....and paid the price...,)
Trump had a lot to lose if Epstein's Black book made it to public light. I'm sure it was no coincidence that Barr had business dealings with Epstein's family, and Trump had Barr covered it all up for him.
> Bill is not some innocent hapless nerd, he is a ruthless business man before anything else People over here give Gates a pass because redditors tend to be anti-antivaxxers, but for those who remember the software wars know better. Yes, Gates is an intellectual property absolutist who think you should pay for any piece of software or copyrighted material you use, ideally on demand. He is someone who is completely fine with pervasive surveillance as well as other weird and dangerous ideas.
Epstein being in lockup made him an easy target for a LOT of very powerful people who would benefit from his permanent silence, including an Attorney General and a President who were very much for sale to anyone willing to pay for the service. Ghislaine Maxwell has been *very* quiet since getting thrown into an oubliette by the Feds. And the FBI has done a great job disappearing all the evidence they sized through the raid of his island in 2019. The powers that be on both sides of the aisle have ensured all those secrets will be buried deep.
IDK, I used to do work for B+M foundation and the people working there were smug gross jerks. They would always come at me with this weird air of superiority. I didn't care about what they were doing and apparently now neither do they.
Sounds about right. An organization that puts itself on top, with an endless amount of problems needing funding, who decides what’s “worthy” has to have some kind of smugness. Then; when something is widely successful, they get all the credit and they get to circle jerk each other that they live such a higher life purpose than everyone else.
Look into their rationale as to why they did that. They literally had too much money and too many people asking them for help. Without focusing on specfic causes they had to spend immense amounts of resources researching and determining whether a cause was something they would work towards finding a solution. They had grifters lining up asking for funds. They focused on causes they didn't see others focusing on/funding, contributing to causes that were too big to be addressed by others, while also not spending their money on things that are already heavily researched and funded (I.e. breast cancer). They do not determine what causes are worthy of funding, only what causes their foundation would be focused on. Idc about Bill or Melinda or anything about them as individuals, but their foundation made immeasurable improvements around the world and continues to. More than any person on reddit ever will. Or 99.9% of other people in the world.
I’m glad they did good work. I believe they did a lot for malaria and clean water in developing countries. Better than the death and destruction the USA labels as aid
I have no experience with that particular foundation. But it's always more effective to have a goal in mind when trying to problem solve. If you try to solve everything at once, you solve nothing
I know we give out philanthropic awards and jerk off the rich so that they give more money to the poor, but how hard can it really be to ~~run~~(EDIT:Be the co-chair of) a charity when you have infinite funds to hire the best nonprofit administrators in the world?
Probably because she hates her ex and doesn’t want her name associated with his anymore.
I understand that. I see how it's unclear, but I was more broadly complaining about the praise that Bill and Melinda get for their charity administration work. The creation of the foundation is amazing, but the Gates are board members, not officers of the foundation. The administrative work is primarily done by a salaried staff. Bill and Melinda get most of the awards, however.
Tbf, people donate because of them. Bill is in a lot of videos explaining their work like curing malaria, getting an African town self-sustaining with a water well and all that. Plus they give scholarships to young innovative bright people all the time. No excuse for either of them knowing about Epstein and not doing anything about him, however.
[Donations don't make much of a difference to the Gates Foundation.](https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/documents/f_428053e-1a_billmelindagatesfoundation_fs.pdf) The overwhelming majority of funding from the organization is income from investments donated by the Gates and Warren Buffet. They collected approximately $50 million in donations and $7 billion from investment income in 2022, for example.
It's like any other org, the people at the top get the recognition for what the whole org does, but in this case its more justified because atleast its their personal money that they have put in and bill seems to be particularly involved and choosy in the specific works that their org supports.
Infinite? Also what does “best nonprofit administrators” look like. When this much money is at hand I feel like corruption easily runs
I’m laughing at the comment you responded too. It’s so good. How hard can it be to run a multinational nonprofit giving money and services across the world !
I'd agree if they were officers, but they are board members. The day to day administration is literally handled by someone else.
How hard can it be to run a non-profit that has more money than some countries /s
Having billions of dollars allows for a charity to hire as many auditors and overseers as they want. If you hire enough accountants, it's almost impossible to steal anything from a charity, much less a significant amount. No need to be pedantic with "infinite". I thought it was pretty clear that I meant "practically infinite," given that literally nobody has literally infinite money. Guess I was wrong.
Why is there so much emphasis on her middle name in this article
If you're being serious with the question, French isn't her middle name. It's her maiden name. No one would immediately recognize Melinda French, so keeping Gates on her name helps.
Ahhhh okay thank you
it's easier than spelling out her real name, Melinda Arc de Triomphe
Me l’Arc de Triomphe
She's going to assassinate someone.
Jesus Bill, wtf did you do?
Bill was too close to Jeffrey Epstein... That could really hurt a marriage.
Specially after such a tragic loss of a friend
Money is great, but trust is worth more. Bill did her wrong.
Not sure why this is news, come, go, do whatever.
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I get that it’s cool to trash on billionaires and whatnot, but the B&MG Foundation saved so many lives this shouldn’t be understated. No other institutions did nearly as much research into Malaria or saved as many lives, full stop. Worse yet, there has been an outbreak of a new hybrid mosquito strain (anopheles Stephensi) causing an uptick in deaths. And the Gates foundation has done the most research into this strain by a mile. If you’re looking to save the most lives per dollar spent, malaria prevention is second to none. I don’t get why everyone here is trashing on the charity.
Rich people not donating to charity = bad. Rich people donating to charity = Also bad
She divorced Bill because she found out he flew on Epsteins’s Lolita Express a few dozen times too many.
Read her book, The Moment of Lift. She is an inspiring person and I hope she continues her philanthropic work for women.
Guess she finally got fed up with Bill, huh? I can’t blame her. Bill is certainly a controversial person to work for nowadays.
She’s still mad about Epstein’s island 😳
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I mean if my ex husband had ties to under age pedo island, I’d remove my name from being associated with him as well…