A spokesperson for Gates told the newspaper that he met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes: ‘Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr Gates.’
Gates’s approaches were clumsy rather than predatory, according to people who knew about some of them, witnessed them firsthand, or reviewed flirtatious emails he sent to them; one labelled them ‘cringeworthy’. At least three people who knew Gates at different points in his life, from the Microsoft days to the foundation, said that he did not prey upon female employees and seek sex with them in exchange for promoting their careers.
‘Bill was far from predatory,’ said a former Microsoft executive with direct insight into his boss’s behaviour. ‘That was never his problem.’ He could be ‘charming, respectful and just fun, so you start there… I know of no real situation in which anyone got anything for sleeping with Bill.’
He appeared to enjoy the adoration that came his way, especially at conferences and events where both women and men would form a throng around him.
Gates’s diary has long been packed with back-to-back meetings. Occasionally he sought freedom from his highly choreographed days. He relished his time with Warren Buffett, especially visits to Omaha, where the two billionaires enjoyed meandering, freewheeling conversations that were in sharp contrast to his structured business life.
Buffett once observed to a friend that Gates’s visits seemed to him to be moments of respite from a tightly scheduled life. When Buffett asked Gates why he couldn’t control his life and live it in a way he wanted to, Gates would simply shrug.
‘Bill likes to have a schedule; I don’t,’ Buffett said to me in an email, putting the word ‘likes’ in bold. Buffett, who is famously conflict-averse, resigned as a trustee of the foundation the month after the divorce was announced. In June he told The Wall Street Journal: ‘The Gates Foundation has no money coming after my death.’
Some saw it as a signal to the world that his legendary friendship with Gates had cooled.
French Gates has said publicly that she wanted the marriage to work. Following the announcement of their divorce and reports of Gates’s extramarital affairs, she told the CBS anchor Gayle King that it wasn’t one thing, but rather many things that had led to the divorce – there came a point when there was ‘enough there’ that it wasn’t healthy.
