Bill and Melinda Gates divorce: a look back at how they met
- Bill and Melinda Gates announce divorce after 27 years of marriage
- They met in 1987, shortly after Melinda started working at Microsoft
From muddy streets in South Africa’s townships to cocktail parties at Davos – Bill and Melinda Gates came as a pair.
Together, they built a charitable empire through Bill’s technology company Microsoft and the massive non-profit they co-founded and co-chair, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gates, 65, summed it up like this in a 2019 Netflix documentary series: “In the case of Melinda, it is truly an equal partner”.
“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 hard core about knowing, you know, immunology, than I am.”
Born October 28, 1955, William H. Gates grew up in Seattle and fell in love with machines and computer programming as a geeky-looking 13-year-old. He left Harvard University after two years to start “Micro-soft”, a software company, with a childhood friend.