Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, paid out $7.88 billion (£5.9 billion) to his ex-wife Melinda French Gates’s private foundation, according to tax filings.
Gates, 70, made the payment in 2024 — believed to be one of the biggest charitable donations in history — as part of their $76 billion divorce settlement, The New York Times reported.
The couple, who have two daughters and a son together, divorced in 2021 after a 27-year marriage, partly over Gates’s connection to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The payment was made to Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up by French Gates, 61, which funds social projects aimed at women.
The sum was revealed in a tax filing showing the settlement’s specific financial terms.
In 2022 French Gates cited her husband’s association with Epstein, who she described as “evil and abhorrent”, as one of the reasons for their split.
She told CBS: “It’s not one thing, it was many things. But I did not like that he’d had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein.”
The couple in New York in 2018
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
She said that she had also met Epstein, but that she “regretted it from the second I stepped in the door”.
“He was abhorrent,” she said. “He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards.”
French Gates resigned as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in May 2024.
Gates met Epstein several times, including at his New York townhouse on at least three occasions starting in 2011, five years after Epstein pleaded guilty to charges of procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute.
He appeared in at least two photos released from Epstein’s estate by Democrats on the House oversight and government reform committee.
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Gates, worth an estimated $118 billion according to Bloomberg, said in 2021 that meeting Epstein had been a “huge mistake”.
He said: “I had several dinners with him, you know, hoping that what he said about getting billions of dollars for philanthropy for global health through contacts that he had might emerge.
“When it looked like that wasn’t a real thing, that relationship ended.”