Rare footage of Bill Gates' talking about love has emerged after his shock split from his wife of 27 years Melinda. Photo / Getty Images
Rare footage of Bill Gates talking about love has surfaced after the shock announcement that his marriage to Melinda is ending after 27 years.
In the video, CNN reporter Jean Enersen asks Bill what qualities he looks for in a partner. The interview was three years before he announced his engagement to Melinda in March 1993, but the couple were together at the time.
Bill stumbled on the question and never really gave an answer, awkwardly laughing as he appeared stumped on how to respond.
"Well, I'm more like, you know, if I have, if I want, hmm," he said in response to laughter from the reporter.
She followed up asking: "Tall or short?".
But Bill ignored the question: 'I'm not sure there is a good answer to that, I mean what am I supposed to say?" putting his hands on his head in a gesture that showed he was clearly uncomfortable with the line of questioning.
The former couple met at Microsoft in 1987 after Melinda started working there as a product manager, hitting it off when they sat next to each other at a work dinner.
Before proposing, Melinda discovered a whiteboard in Bill's bedroom outlining the pros and cons of marriage, which she found hilarious.
"I took the idea of marriage very seriously," Bill said in the in the 2019 Netflix documentary Inside Bill's Brain.
The two married in Hawaii on New Year's Day in 1994, seven years after meeting.
They tried to keep it as private as possible, booking all the empty rooms at the hotel where their guests were and hiring all the island's helicopters to keep paparazzi at bay.
He was 38 at the time they got married and she was 29, and the couple went on to have three children together: Jennifer, now 25, Rory, 21, and Phoebe, 18.
Bill Gates, 65, is the fourth richest person in the world, and is estimated to be worth US$130.5 billion (NZ$180.5b), according to Forbes, after he became the world's youngest self-made billionaire when Microsoft went public in 1986.
When the pair met, they reportedly shared a love of puzzles, while Melinda enjoyed beating Bill at maths games, although the relationship wasn't serious at the start.
"She had other boyfriends, and I had Microsoft," said Bill.
"We were like, 'Hey we are not really serious about each other, are we? We are not going to demand each other's time.'"
"I was new to Microsoft, there were a lot of men there, and you are still looking around," Melinda added.
When Melinda fell pregnant with their first child, Bill was shocked when she declared she was not going to continue working at Microsoft and would stay at home to be a full-time mum.
She said she didn't have an example of working mothers while growing up in Dallas, although her mum led a small real estate investment set up by her parents.
"The other thing that played into it – I mean, we have to be honest: Bill was the CEO of Microsoft, right? That is a hard-charging tech industry. That was a very fast-growing company.
"I kept saying to him, 'But somebody has to be home. If we want the values that we both believe in as a couple for the kids, somebody has to be home to instil those values,'" she told Business Insider Australia in 2019.
"But then my view changed over time when I felt like I had created the environment where I could give my kids privacy and let them grow up to be themselves. We had the values, we had people around us who were also imparting those same values that we had. Then I felt, like, 'OK, I do want to work, and I will be a working mum.'"
Throughout the marriage, Melinda said Bill and her would always do the dishes together after dinner.
"In the case of Melinda, it is a truly equal partner," Bill said in the Netflix documentary. "She's a lot like me in that she is optimistic and she is interested in science.
"She is better with people than I am. She's a tiny bit less hardcore about knowing, you know, immunology, than I am."
Just last year on Valentine's Day, Bill had posted a picture of the two of them with the caption "I couldn't ask for a better partner on this journey."
The former couple's charitable organisation the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was set up in 2000, has spent US$53.8b on philanthropic projects since starting.
"We listen and respect each other and then we come to a common viewpoint and that's what we take forward," Melinda said on Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, referring to their foundation work.
In December 2005, Time Magazine named Bill and Melinda Gates the Persons of the Year alongside U2 frontman Bono, calling them "The Good Samaritans."