What Really Led To Bill Gates' Divorce, According To Ex Wife Melissa

In one of the most high-profile divorces of 2021, billionaire tech mogul Bill Gates and philanthropist Melinda French Gates announced that they were going their separate ways after 27 years of marriage. When the pair went public with their decision to split, they released a joint statement which said, "After a great deal of thought and a lot of work on our relationship, we have made the decision to end our marriage." In the actual divorce filing, however, Melinda called her marriage to Bill "irretrievably broken." This begs the question of what really led to the Gates' divorce, at least according to Melinda?

Since the initial split, more details have come to light regarding why Bill and Melinda Gates got divorced. In May 2021, a source told People that the two had been in the process of separating for a while, and were simply waiting for their oldest child to turn 18 to finally pull the trigger on their breakup. The source also stated that the divorce itself was the result of a "combo of things." Since then, Melinda has set the record straight about the end of her relationship with Bill, making it clear that it primarily came down to a lack of trust in their marriage. ""We were[ a famous married couple]. But I learned ... both partners have to be honest with one another," Melinda told "The Late Show" host Stephen Colbert in April 2025, adding, "And if you can't, you can't have intimacy and you can't have trust. And so, in the end, I had to go."

Speaking to CBS in 2022, Melinda French Gates effectively confirmed People's 2021 report by stating that a number of different factors led to her decision to divorce Bill Gates. That being said, there are a number of things that likely contributed to that overarching lack of trust Melinda mentioned. For starters, the Microsoft co-founder was allegedly unfaithful to the philanthropist on multiple occasions over the course of their marriage. Bill acknowledged the reports of infidelity during a 2022 interview with Today, though stopped short of explicitly confirming them. "I certainly made mistakes and I take responsibility," he said, adding, "I don't think delving into the particulars at this point is constructive, but yes, I caused pain, and I feel terrible about that."

Melinda herself had been asked about the reports in the aforementioned CBS interview just two months prior, to which she responded, "Those are questions Bill needs to answer." However, while she didn't discuss the allegations of cheating, Melinda did confirm that she wasn't a fan of her ex-husband's ties to Jeffrey Epstein. "As I said, it's not one thing, it was many things. But I did not like that he'd had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no," Melinda told CBS in 2022. She added that her one and only interaction with Epstein was so unpleasant that she had nightmares about it after the fact. Bill himself later expressed regret over his association with Epstein in an early-2025 interview with The Wall Street Journal.