In the age of the multibillion-dollar tech divorce, Melinda Gates reveals how the couple made it to their silver wedding anniversary unscathed.
Outside, superyachts sparkle in the sunshine and carefree folk are playing volleyball in bikinis. It's one of the first hot days of the year in the city of Kirkland, Washington and there's a bunking-off-school atmosphere. Inside, however, a gas fire is flickering and everyone's working silently at their desks. The carefully curated bookshelves hold tomes by, or about, inspiring females: Malala Yousafzai, Oprah Winfrey, Eleanor Roosevelt.
The Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates reportedly adheres to a schedule broken down into five-minute slots and, waiting outside his wife's office, I sense that Melinda might do the same. Three immaculately dressed women seem to be overseeing the smooth running of my allotted hour with Mrs Gates. "She'll come in through that door over there and sit in this chair," her assistant Beth explains needlessly.
Gates has been delayed by 10 minutes. It might not sound much, but if time is money, 600 seconds in the Gateses' world costs a pretty penny. Suddenly, she strides in, all billion-dollar smiles, wearing a pink blazer that subtly matches her lipstick — and the invisible timer clicks on.
Gates has written a book — part-memoir, part-manifesto — about how empowering women everywhere, from sub-Saharan Africa to Appalachian America, is the key to a better world. "From high rates of education, employment and economic growth to low rates of teen births, domestic violence and crime," Gates writes, "the inclusion and elevation of women correlate with the signs of a healthy society."
As one of the planet's greatest philanthropists, Gates has visited many of its most deprived places in the past 20 years.
How does she manage the jarring adjustment of immersing herself in Third World communities and then returning to her $125m mansion outside Seattle? "When you're out in those situations and there's no running water and I'm literally going with the mum to the well, walking long distances, just the fact that you can fly to the US and turn on your tap and have clean water — no matter who you are, the adjustment is enormous," she replies tactfully.
In the past year, Bill Gates, 63, has gained another $10b or so to be thankful for — ratcheting his worth back up to the $100b mark. Along with the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, he is one of the world's two "centibillionaires". Bezos remains top dog despite the end of his 25-year marriage to his wife, MacKenzie. Their divorce settlement of at least $35b smashed records earlier this month.
When this much money is sloshing about, divorce, affairs and family fallouts seem to be the standard. The Gateses, however, appear to be Richard Curtis-style rom-com happy. This year they celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. On Instagram, Gates posted a throwback video of Bill cutting their wedding cake as Melinda howls with laughter beside him. He hadn't realised the cake had a concealed cardboard centre. "I thought my heart was full that night, but the last 25 years have taught me just how full a heart can get," she wrote alongside the clip.
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I congratulate Gates on her marriage milestone and, just like in the wedding video, she throws back her head and laughs. What's so funny? "I think I laugh because, I mean, it's funny, we've just got to a point in life where Bill and I can both laugh about more things. And, believe me, I can remember some days that were so incredibly hard in our marriage where you thought, 'Can I do this?'"
She recalls exploding with rage when Bill wasn't helping to pack up the car and sort out the children yonks ago because his head was buried in a book about Winston Churchill. It's obviously an ancient spat.
The social cachet of computer nerds has skyrocketed since Melinda met Bill more than 30 years ago. Now, men like the Tesla co-founder Elon Musk and the Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel enjoy a sort of rock-star status, not least in the eyes of supermodels and Hollywood actresses. People who pursue wealthy tech titans even have a name: founder hounders. What does Gates make of this? "I don't know," she says, perhaps with a hint of irritation. "Look, I wasn't going for a certain type, obviously, when I fell in love with Bill, right? But I think I was a little bit predisposed because I'm a computer science major, so when I was in college the people I spent a lot of time with were young men and a lot of them were geeky."
In the book, Gates writes candidly about her loneliness in the marriage when they'd had their first child and Bill was working fiendishly hard at Microsoft. She is equally frank about her battle to create an equal partnership with Bill when, at times, she felt invisible. On the work front that battle is long won: they are very much co-presidents of the United Gates of America, as wits have dubbed their foundation.
One of the secrets of staying married to a work-obsessive tech titan is patience. She claims Bill is incredibly easy to live with, before adding: "He needs a little training, and he'd tell you that too."
She has helped him find a balance between work and family. "When he was having trouble making the decision about getting married, he was incredibly clear that it was not about me, it was about 'Can I get the balance right between work and family life?'"
Bill wanted a party for their silver anniversary, but Melinda didn't fancy planning a big bash, so they escaped a deux to their favourite spot in Mexico. They enjoyed beach walks, movies and reading the same novel at the same time: Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow.
The couple have three children, Jennifer, 22, Rory, 19 and Phoebe, 16. It must be pretty daunting for someone who is dating a Gates to come over to meet the parents, I suggest. Gates laughs: "Yes, we try to break the ice but it's not the easiest."
She remembers one new boyfriend of her daughter's visiting for the first time: "We have a tradition in our family that when we sit down to dinner we all go round and say one thing we're thankful for. We had this kid go last but I didn't have the heart to tell him that we also all hold hands because he was next to my husband and I thought, 'Oh my God, this boy is going to pass out.'"
In a fantastic understatement, Gates writes in her book: "Great wealth can be very confusing." When your personal fortune is often more than the GDP of the countries you visit, how do you stay sane? She pauses and shifts uncomfortably. "All I can do is speak for myself," she says carefully. "And the way that I can keep myself best grounded is to, um, live out the family life that I want to live." A family life, one supposes, that doesn't involve gold baths of vintage champagne, brattish children appearing in reality TV shows and endless parties on superyachts, like the ones sparkling outside.
Her children are also good for keeping egos in check. "If you say something that's just slightly off in the press, or you wrote a good speech and come home and maybe feel a little full of yourself, they're going to call you out on it at the dinner table. They don't think you're so great."
How to bring up sane kids when you're mind-bogglingly loaded is a different matter. Gates quit working at Microsoft in order to raise her family and, for years, avoided the limelight to guard their privacy. They were even enrolled at school under her maiden name. "You try and surround them with communities who believe in who they are. You can suss out people pretty quickly and I had to teach them their radar very early of who likes them for [themselves] and who's excited to come see our house or meet their dad …"
It's true: if you have a Gates as a classmate, you'd surely want to explore the cinema, trampoline room and 232sq m gym in their 24-bathroom family home. The children are unlikely to be billionaires any time soon either — they will reportedly inherit $10m each; the rest of the fortune is being given away. "Billionaire" seems to have become a dirty word of late. Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks CEO and prospective US presidential candidate who is worth $3.7b, recently said he prefers the term "people of wealth". Does Gates mind the billionaire tag? "Um, well, I'm not a big fan of labels to begin with, so I don't think of myself that way. I grew up in a very middle-class family in Dallas, Texas." Her father, an aerospace engineer, and mother, a housewife, expected her to work to help fund her education and it sounds as though her rigorous work ethic was cemented early.
As the 2020 election race kicks into gear, there is a growing conversation about America's wealth inequality. "We went through the Gilded Age with the robber barons, so it's not the first time it's happened. But it's appropriate for it to be coming up. You don't want to have the vast majority of wealth concentrated in just a few hands," says Gates.
The fiery Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leading the charge for a 70 per cent tax on the rich. Is that the way to go? "The wealthy should be paying more taxes, and Bill and I believe in a progressive tax system. It's good that she's bringing up the idea," she says.
Both Bill and Melinda's names have previously been thrown out as desirable candidates for Vice-President. Would she ever up sticks from Lake Washington for Washington DC? "I will never - and I don't use the word 'never' lightly in any conversation - go into politics."
For years, Gates has passionately campaigned for a woman's right to have children as and when she pleases. The chipping away of family planning services in America must horrify her. "There's no country in the world that hasn't gone through this transition from low- to middle- to high-income country without ensuring that women have access to family planning, because when women can space the birth of their children, they can work if they choose to."
She begins talking more cautiously: "So I'm incredibly disappointed at this current administration. As a foundation we've worked very effectively with every Republican and Democratic administration but a lot of the great contraceptive services that exist in the United States are being dismantled." The move to cut funding for clinics that perform abortions, or even simply refer for abortions, is "not only anti-women, it's anti-single mums. It's unbelievable."
Gates surely despairs of the 45th president but is far too diplomatic to put the boot in. "What I know in politics is that people come and go." And she's determined to see the upside: "I think these things that are very anti-women and very negative sometimes also stimulate women to rise up where they've been a bit complacent."
Are we generally all a bit too glass-half-empty? "Yes, we over-fixate on the negative. We almost can't help it as human beings, psychologically. I do think some of our electronics are playing into that. They're making it harder to put your phone down and put the news away." The Gateses keep their mobiles outside the bedroom and the children must unplug after a certain time at night (she won't reveal the specific rules for fear of embarrassing them).
We go back to the book. At its heart are inspirational, often harrowing stories, such as that of Kakenya, a Maasai girl in Kenya, who, aged 13, agreed to endure female genital mutilation but only on the condition that she be allowed to continue studying rather than be married off to the boy she'd been engaged to from the age of 5. A chapter on child brides makes for particularly heart-wrenching reading. Gates recalls one Bangladeshi girl whose husband's first words to her were, "Stop crying." She details how children will sometimes have their heads covered while travelling to their new husband's villages so they can't find their way back home if they run away.
She remembers struggling not to collapse in tears while meeting a group of child brides, aged 10 or 11, in Ethiopia. It was only back at her hotel that she crumbled. Allowing your heart to break is crucial, she says. "You have to not just tuck that stuff away — you have to process it and there are incredible lessons in it."
Surely your to-do list can get a smidge overwhelming when your mission is to improve humanity. Does she ever crave a duvet day? "Of course! It's then that I get outside for a walk or go out on my kayak. When everything seems catastrophic, that's a loss of perspective, I think."
She has good friends to lean on, too. Gates lights up while discussing her "spiritual group", a small gang of girlfriends who have met up monthly for the past 18 years. "We're going through these circles of life together: marriages, pregnancies, the deaths of some spouses, ageing parents. I feel like the biggest beneficiary because I happen to be the youngest."
Talk turns to the backlash against the tech giants and the power they wield. "Technology can be used for good or for evil and it has some risks. Unfortunately some of those risks played out. Technology is moving so fast and it's exacerbating this. I've been surprised, though, at how big the backlash has become."
How can the industry salvage its reputation? "They'll have to figure that out. My role is to figure out how we get more diverse people at the table, more women making decisions and in places of power."
As Beth alerts us to the timer running out, Gates is talking about carving out quiet time in our frenetic lives. She keeps a spiritual journal and meditates at least once a day without fail. Spirituality has also helped Gates manage her perfectionism.
"I had to work so hard on my perfectionism for a while," she says, admitting that this affliction took root while she was at school. "Now I've let go of that, I know I'm not perfect. I'm not even close to perfect. I have good days and I have bad days and that's okay," she says. "We're all a work in progress." True - but some of us less so than others.
The Moment of Lift by Melinda Gates is available now.
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London