Before all the revelations about his divorce, Bill Gates was just a nice American techno-philanthropist billionaire. That bubble burst on May 3.
Sure, Bill Gates had already amassed an absurd amount of money by co-founding Microsoft and was living in a $ 130 million mansion with a room with an interior trampoline. But he was also known for taking his kids to school, watching Modern Family, dressing up as Ned Flanders, and standing in line to buy his favorite cheeseburgers.
There was power in the image of any Gates father. Over the past two decades, Gates propelled the vast charitable endeavors of himself and his wife Melinda into another stratosphere of social influence. He became the leading business voice in solving the world’s problems, he was seen as just as comfortable pontificate on eradicating disease and improving education systems on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, as when he advocated for climate change and COVID- 19 on Fox News.
That popularity bubble burst on May 3, when Bill and Melinda French Gates announced that they were splitting up, after 27 years of marriage. Quickly, unflattering details emerged, including reports that Bill had an extramarital affair and sought out other office romances with employees of Microsoft and the humanitarian foundation that bears their names. In filing for divorce, Melinda said their relationship was “hopelessly broken.” The question now is whether Bill’s reputation is too.
It’s easy to forget that Bill Gates wasn’t always so publicly revered. During the height of the PC revolution, he became the ruthless nerd-turned-tycoon who brutally and profanely berated his subordinates and allegedly attempted to cut the capital of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen while undergoing treatment against cancer in the early 1980s. (Gates has said his memories of the events are different than Allen’s). Windows software, its flagship creation, was a disaster that frustrated millions of consumers, and Steve Jobs complained that Gates and his team showed “no shame” and “had no taste” in ripping off Apple products. Even the judge who oversaw Microsoft’s crippling turn-of-the-century monopoly trial said Gates had “a Napoleonic view of himself and his company, an arrogance that stems from outright power and success.”
However, in the 2000s, the richest man in the world seemed to have realized that he had to change that robber and baron of Redmond narrative, and that his wealth could help. He resigned as CEO of Microsoft and turned his attention to what would become the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which eventually gave more than $ 50 billion to fighting malaria and AIDS and increasing childhood vaccination rates. earning the couple endless accolades, not to mention the 2005 cover of Time magazine’s “People of the Year” along with U2’s Bono. Less than a decade after Microsoft’s antitrust trial, Gates was hanging around Capitol Hill advising lawmakers on technology competitiveness and healthcare initiatives in the United States.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google News“I was fortunate to accumulate in my work at Microsoft a property that was worth a lot of money,” he told Charlie Rose in 2008, shortly after shifting to a full-time focus on his pledges of donation. “Warren (Buffett) likes to call that ‘claim verification’ in society, where you can say, you know, have 1,000 people build a pyramid for you or do whatever you want.”
Without doubt, these massive philanthropic claims controls have greatly helped vulnerable populations. They have also proven astonishingly effective in rehabilitating his image from tyrannical technocrat to holy savior. Good actions buy goodwill. His and Melinda’s annual founding letters became more popular than Microsoft’s product launches. Media scrutiny disappeared for the most part, replaced by perpetual guest editor posts at major publications that crave Bill’s world-changing ideas. His 2015 TED talk racked up tens of millions of views, his occasional book recommendations were met with endorsement by Oprah, and it wasn’t long before Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
This was more than a superficial fame. Gates’ civic influence influences discourse on critical and controversial issues (he recently lobbied to keep COVID-19 vaccine patent protections in place), an influence that is threatened as more lurid details emerge from his current divorce process. That doesn’t suggest that NGOs and non-profit organizations stop accepting your money. But, as skeptics have pointed out, if you’ve sought inappropriate relationships with female employees, the foundation that bears your name is probably no longer the ideal advocate for women’s empowerment. If he got too close to Jeffrey Epstein years ago, even after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution, Gates is clearly not the right leader to campaign against sex trafficking. It is not so much that you are at risk of being “canceled” altogether, but of being “Ctrl-Alt-Del” from your position at the top of morale.
Also read: Nervousness in the world of philanthropy due to the Gates’ divorce
A Gates spokesman said that “the rumors and speculation surrounding Gates’ divorce are becoming increasingly absurd” and that “the employee abuse claim is false.” The representative added: “The claims that Gates had any personal conversations with Epstein at these meetings, which were about philanthropy, are simply not true.”
This was also supposed to be a year of focus on climate change for Bill, with the billionaire calling for arms through the February launch of his book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” and bringing world leaders together. and mainstream consumers to invest in green tech research, set carbon regulations, and buy more electric cars and eat less meat. Instead, she only had a few months on the road with her book before the eyes of the world focused on her divorce.
Another consequence could be that Bill’s personal brand, his cunning as a people’s billionaire, will require a tough reevaluation. An essential part of his bespectacled benefactor charm was that he felt authentic and approachable. In 2019, a Netflix documentary series even tried to take viewers inside Bill’s brain. Released just a month before Melinda reportedly began consulting with lawyers for her divorce, the brilliant three-part ode to Bill’s folk genius portrays him as a devoted couple drinking Diet Coke and incessantly messing up their hair while think how to save the world.
Yet now, the show only serves as a jarring reminder of how much engineering went into revising Bill’s personality, especially when conflicting evidence comes to light, such as his apparent habit of disparaging his wife in meetings.
In 2017, in the foreword to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s autobiography “Hit Refresh,” Bill Gates wrote about the importance of legacy. “As the title of this book indicates, (Satya) did not completely break with the past; when you hit refresh in your browser, some of what’s on the page stays the same, ”Gates wrote.
His point was that although Microsoft had reinvented itself in the many years since Gates led the software giant, its source code still retained parts of its DNA. The same could be said for the broader technology landscape. Gates had reinvented himself as a philanthropist, but he will also remain a legend among startup co-founders and unicorn CEOs, a statesman in Silicon Valley at a time when many of its once mythologized leaders passed away, disappeared. or fell from grace.
