Before setting off to the US to meet Melinda French Gates, I called a woman I know who had met her a decade ago at a media event in London. Back then French Gates was married to Bill, the Microsoft co-founder, and he was still wealthier than Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. I asked what the world’s richest man’s wife had been like.
“Bewilderingly downbeat. She seemed terribly unhappy in her own body. She was talking about philanthropy and international development, and she absolutely knew her stuff. But she seemed to take no pleasure in being herself. It was really puzzling and sad.”
This didn’t sound at all like the author of the new memoir I’d just read. Nor did it sound like the French Gates I’d seen and heard on TV and podcasts lately. And it certainly did not describe the woman I would meet a few days later in Seattle.
French Gates walks into her office building in killer sexy heels — vertiginous Valentino nudes rimmed with sharply pointed studs. I’m no fashion expert but these are fierce. Her long mane is glossy, her make-up glowing, her dress cut for maximal confidence.
I thought French Gates was going to hate the photoshoot but she navigates it with ease, joking with the photographer while switching effortlessly from one expert pose to another. It’s a masterclass in feminine self-possession.
• Bill Gates: Trump, Musk and how my neurodiversity made me
The whole building is conspicuously female. Overlooking Lake Washington, framed by the Olympic Mountains, it is filled with natural light and greenery, the decor all blonde wood and matte white, with bookcases bearing classic feminist titles such as The Feminine Mystique. Beside the sinks in the ladies’ loos I find not just tampons but every kind of toiletry a woman could want — deodorant, make-up remover, hairspray.
Everyone in the two-storey building works for French Gates. Her organisation, Pivotal Ventures, has various divisions — philanthropy, investments, partnerships, advocacy — but all share one purpose: to put power into the hands of women. She founded it in 2015 while co-running the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and in 2019 committed to spend $1 billion. Their marriage ended in 2021 and she resigned from the foundation last year to devote all her time to Pivotal, committing another $1 billion. Reported to be worth more than $30 billion, she has pledged to give away the majority of her wealth.
However, we are here to talk about her new memoir, The Next Day. “I never expected to be writing a book like this,” it begins. “Then again, there’s a lot that’s happened in my life in the last few years that I didn’t see coming.”
It opens in the autumn of 2019, at a moment when problems in her marriage had “reached fever pitch”. The New York Times, she writes, had just published a “deeply disturbing article” about her husband’s many business meetings over a charitable fund with the recently deceased and utterly disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted child sex offender. The article, she writes, “raised serious questions about Bill’s conduct — questions that suggested he had betrayed not only our marriage but also our values”.
“Bill Gates regrets ever meeting with Epstein and recognises it was an error in judgment to do so,” a spokeswoman for Gates said at the time. “He recognises that entertaining Epstein’s ideas related to philanthropy gave Epstein an undeserved platform that was at odds with Gates’s personal values and the values of his foundation.”
A practising Catholic, educated by priests and married for 25 years with three children, to French Gates divorce was “almost unimaginable”. In the following weeks she had a recurring nightmare in which she was standing in a beautiful house when the floor began to cave. One night she dreamt of standing with her family on the edge of a cliff when the ledge beneath her gave way and she plummeted. She didn’t need Sigmund Freud to tell her what the dreams meant.
She kept trying to silence the voice in her head that was telling her, “This isn’t right any more.” In February 2020 the couple took a trip to Santa Fe in New Mexico to try to save their marriage. It didn’t work. On the final night she told Bill that when they got home he would have to move out. “It was,” she writes, “one of the scariest conversations I’d ever had.”
Sitting in her office after the photoshoot, she doesn’t seem as if she could be scared of anything. The weather outside is constantly changing: one moment the sun is blazing, the next hailstones are hammering the windows, and her face changes equally often. With each new expression — solemn, amused, pensive, animated — she looks completely different. But she never looks less than in control.
“I’ve just got to a point in life at 60 where I’ve been through a lot. I remember my mom said, after she crossed 60, ‘You know, I just find myself speaking my mind more. I go pick up at the dry cleaner and I tell them how they could be more efficient, you know?’ ” French Gates allows a soft smile. “And I kind of feel like that. I’ve lived life now, right? Life has a lot of lessons for us. And they can be hard but they can also be beautiful.”
Her book is a startlingly intimate account of the lessons she has learnt from motherhood, grief, divorce, therapy. An alternative title could have been Diary of a Recovering Perfectionist, for she writes a lot about “releasing my grip on perfectionism”. Had we met in the past, she would have prepped obsessively for the interview. She used to overprepare for everything, even meetings with her own staff.
“Think about who I was married to at the time,” she writes. “He may not have known everything, but he sure gives that impression.” But when I ask if she prepped for our conversation, she says cheerfully, “That I do not do any more.”
I wonder if it was about being Mrs Bill Gates or Melinda French. Would she have put herself under as much pressure had she married a farmer in Texas? “I might not have known enough about fertiliser and rain!” she says, laughing. “Oh, I already had it in me. Look, I grew up in a household with highly intelligent parents. My dad was an engineer on the Apollo mission. You’d better not get anything wrong on the Apollo mission or a rocket might crash, right?” Her folksy conversational style could not be less like her ex-husband’s. When I interviewed him four years ago he spoke as if delivering a lecture.
“So I had high expectations of myself. And then when you’re married to somebody who is — I mean, Bill is highly intelligent. But it certainly wasn’t his fault. It was my fault.”
French Gates was born in Dallas 60 years ago, the second of four children to an aerospace engineer and a stay-at-home mother. Her father had been born poor in Georgia and left home with no more than his paper round earnings and a jar of peanut butter to study at a local technical college, from where he won a scholarship to Stanford.
At her private Catholic girls’ school in the early 1980s a maths teacher persuaded the head to buy some Apple computers and she was hooked. Graduating top of her year, she won a place at Duke University in North Carolina to study computer science and economics, where she was initially intimidated by the “brash, arrogant guys” on her course and the unfamiliar programming language. She had learnt Basic; at Duke they taught Pascal. But Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor and close friend of the Gates family, would later observe, “Bill is smart as hell, obviously. But in terms of seeing the whole picture, she’s smarter.”
She stayed on at Duke to complete an MBA and in 1987 joined Microsoft as a marketing manager. Then still a modest-sized tech start-up, it wasn’t long before she met the boss. Already a billionaire, he asked her out in the company car park a few months later and they married in 1994.
The courtship had not been plain sailing. Gates was fond of partying and strip clubs, and she once found him in his bedroom writing a list of the pros and cons of marriage on a whiteboard. They wed at the point, she has previously said, when it was either that or split up.
The marriage was not easy, either. In her 2019 book The Moment of Lift, she wrote about feeling “alone in our marriage” after the birth of their eldest daughter, Jennifer, in 1996. She had resigned from Microsoft to be a mother, gained 5st during her pregnancy and revelled in the “freedom from eating what I thought I was supposed to eat”. But Bill was never at home and she found herself thinking, “OK, maybe he wanted to have kids in theory, but not in reality.”
They lived in a 66,000 sq ft house in Seattle with 6 kitchens and 24 bathrooms, which he’d begun building when still a bachelor, and she hated. “Bill has often said he has always had a partner in everything he’s ever done,” she wrote in 2019. “That’s true, but he hasn’t always had an equal partner. He’s had to learn how to be an equal.”
She has never said when she first knew about his now notorious womanising, but since their divorce the press has been awash with reports of his extramarital infidelities. He had an affair with a Microsoft employee in 2000, and allegedly another with a twentysomething Russian bridge player ten years later. “Mr Gates was known,” The New York Times reported in 2021, “for making clumsy approaches to women in and out of the office.”
In 2000, a year after their son, Rory, was born, the William H Gates Foundation, which the couple had founded when they wed, became the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Their third child, Phoebe, was born two years later and French Gates wrestled with classic maternal guilt, conflicted by obligations to the foundation. She also struggled with being eclipsed. Last year she told Vanity Fair, “If I went into a president or prime minister’s office and I was with my ex-husband, they would turn to him first.” She knew every bit as much about their philanthropy, but “unless I interrupted the conversation, they could have kept going for the whole meeting”. She now writes: “In the decade or so before my marriage fell apart, my inner voice faded. With it, I lost my centre, an essential part of myself.”
When a friend first suggested she see a therapist, French Gates was stunned. She thought therapy was for other people. “I did! I was, like, that’s great for them. Not me.” She bursts into laughter, widening her eyes. “How silly. What a silly notion.” Did it threaten her perfectionism? She considers this. “Yeah. Maybe. Like, there’s something wrong with me that I need therapy.”
She kept resisting the suggestion until their 20th wedding anniversary in 2014, when she suffered a panic attack while at lunch with Bill. “I’d heard of people having panic attacks and I didn’t know if it was a real thing.” But this was definitely a real thing; she couldn’t breathe. She called a friend and asked for the number of a good therapist. “Then, as I got into the process, I realised no, it doesn’t mean I’m damaged. It means I’ve been through some difficult things that I need to figure out.”
I ask when she last had a panic attack and a silence falls while she thinks. “Probably during the negotiations of my divorce. When you’re leaving a marriage, it’s very, very hard. And the negotiations were tough.” She knew they would be; she had seen how her husband dealt with the Department of Justice in the 1990s, when Microsoft was accused of violating antitrust laws. The panic attacks during the divorce negotiations got so bad she had to call her therapist in the middle of the night.
The couple were worth about $130 billion when she filed for divorce six months after separating, and her unimaginable wealth explains why almost everything she ever says or writes is always qualified by an acknowledgement of her breathtaking privilege. The care she takes to do so makes me wonder what it must be like to navigate life knowing everyone in the world envies her and thinks she has it easy.
“Well, look, I have to be the first one to acknowledge I have privilege.” She does it in the very next breath. “I mean, even the fact I can have a therapist. Do you know how hard it is for somebody to find a therapist right now? So even the fact I can have one is an enormous privilege. But I didn’t grow up in this privilege. So I do understand what it’s like to look at someone else and say ” She leaves the sentence unfinished.
“But to me, there are absolutely common threads that connect us as humanity. And yes, wealth can shield you from some of it. You might not be worried about paying your mortgage or putting dinner on the table. But the emotions, the grief, the anger, the hurts, those all still happen.”
The Next Day is far from a misery memoir. French Gates is meticulously philosophical, optimistic and grateful for everything she has experienced, and she hasn’t a bad word to say about her ex-husband. Her new post-divorce radiance, however, speaks volumes. Reading between the lines — and having interviewed Gates myself — I don’t think her marriage was at all enviable. I found him cold, haughty and brittle, and nothing in French Gates’s memoir or our conversation revises that impression.
After she resigned from their foundation last year, she said, “I’m role-modelling for society. I believe women should have their full decision-making authority.” What was it, I ask, that prevented her from having that authority in her marriage? She pauses pointedly and her expression folds shut. “Yeah. I’m not going to That chapter, that part of my life is behind me. So I don’t want to go back and adjudicate why that was hard or go through those details.”
For all French Gates’s warmth and engagement, there is a palpable glass wall between us. Impenetrable and inescapably isolating, she has lived behind it ever since her marriage at just 29. “Giving away money your family will never need is not an especially noble act,” she wrote in 2021, but it is a way to remain connected to the world. She must therefore have been horrified when the Gates’s foundation, with its long history of work on vaccines, became the target of conspiracy theory rage. The most egregious myth to fly around the world when the pandemic struck claimed that Covid was a cover for the Gates’s plan to implant us with trackable microchips. I ask French Gates how she insulated herself from the fever of ugly accusations.
“You put your head down and you keep doing the work. And I knew the truth about what we were doing. I had met moms and dads all over the world who lined up to get life-saving vaccines for their children.” She adds, “And I didn’t tell the world, ‘Thou shalt have a vaccine.’ I kept saying, ask your paediatrician, I’m not a doctor.”
Antivax conspiracy theories were not the reason why she decided to redirect her philanthropic work to women’s causes through Pivotal Ventures. It was the overturning of Roe v Wade and her sense that women’s rights were at threat. “I never,” she says softly, “thought my granddaughters would have fewer rights than I had,” so I ask how she explains this feminist backlash.
“I do think leadership matters. You look at the leaders who are in place right now and it’s devastating, but it’s not a surprise. Think about how they talk about issues in the world.” Her voice begins to swell. “Look at USAid,” the state department’s international aid agency that President Trump shut down. “Republican and Democratic administrations had supported it. Now we have an administration, because of their values and the hubris, we will have 17 million women next year who do not have access to maternal mortality services,” to prevent deaths in pregnancy and childbirth. “Seventeen million! What does that say about values?”
She must, I assume, know Elon Musk well. Her expression stiffens. “Not well. I’ve met him, but I do not know him well, no.” She has known Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg for decades. Was she shocked to see these former liberals reinvent themselves as fawning broligarchs in the court of Donald Trump? She hesitates, choosing her words with care. “I think sometimes people’s true character gets tested. Sometimes we mistake a great business leader for also having some of the same values that we have. And let’s be honest, some people don’t always show their true colours, right?”
Her ex-husband visited the White House in February to make the case for USAid to the president. Would she meet with Trump? She turns her gaze to the window. After six seconds of silence she responds in monotone: “I don’t think there’s any reason to right now.” It would be pointless? “At the moment, yes. I meet with people where I feel like we can make progress on issues.” And you don’t see that now? “I do not.”
Times Radio
She met Trump during his first term, “to try and keep the US funding up for contraceptives, because they make such a difference in women’s lives”. What was he like? The silence this time stretches to 21 seconds. “I didn’t get anywhere. We’ll just say that.” I ask if we are watching a dictatorship unfolding. After another long silence: “It appears that’s what he would like.”
If she was worried enough about the reversal of women’s rights last year to commit all her resources to their cause, the direction of travel in Washington has since only accelerated. Has she, I ask, considered running for office herself?
Without hesitation: “No, I will never run for public office.” Because? “I like my life the way it is. I’ve been up close and personal to many of those offices.” She shudders. “And it’s not for me. I like my life.”
She is happy now living in a house that has only one kitchen. Her children have all left home; Jennifer is a paediatrician in New York, married to an Olympic equestrian, with two young daughters. Rory completed a master’s in Chicago in 2022 and is reportedly studying for a doctorate but keeps a low public profile; Phoebe graduated from Stanford last summer and is a women’s health advocate and fashion entrepreneur in New York, dating Arthur Donald, who is Paul McCartney’s grandson. At any mention of them French Gates’s face fills with pride.
Her ex-husband has been in a relationship with Paula Hurd, the widow of the former Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, since 2022, but she remains single, and says she is enjoying dating. I’m curious to know how someone like her meets men. “Through friends.” She beams. “I have had so many friends introduce me to people and it’s been lovely.” Are men intimidated by her wealth and status? She grins. “I’m sure some are and some aren’t. But I’m not really looking for somebody who would be intimidated by my status. That kind of rules them out, right?”
Earlier this year her ex-husband told The Times their divorce ranked as the greatest failure of his life. It was, he said, “at the top of the list”. I ask French Gates if it tops her own list. “It was something that was necessary. If you can’t live your values out inside your most intimate relationship, it was necessary.” She breaks off, looking faintly perplexed. “I don’t even quite know what to make of that statement, so I’m not going to comment on what he says. He’s got his own life. I have my life now. I am very happy.”
The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward by Melinda French Gates (Bluebird £17.99 pp176). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
