Bill and Melinda Gates announced they are ending their marriage on Monday.
The couple, who are among the wealthiest people in the world, said the decision came “after a great deal of thought and a lot of work on [their] relationship.”
“We no longer believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives,” the couple said while pledging to continue to work together at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, their charitable endeavor “that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives.”
— Bill Gates (@BillGates) May 3, 2021
Bill and Melinda Gates, who met at Microsoft, the company Bill Gates co-founded in 1975, were together for 27 years and have three grown children together. The Gateses have given tens of billions of dollars to charitable causes. In the past year, their foundation announced the donation of tens of millions of dollars toward developing COVID-19 vaccines and increasing access to them in low-income countries.
Bill Gates is 65, and Melinda Gates is 56.
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With more than 242,000 acres spanning 18 states across the United States, Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the country. The Gates family has been actively investing in farming for years, including a $300 million donation in 2017 supporting research to help low-income farmers in Asia and Africa battle climate change.
Although the financial details of the divorce are not yet clear, the couple’s split could become the most expensive in history. Bill Gates’s net worth is estimated at over $130 billion, and he retains just over 1% of shares of Microsoft, which has a market cap of $1.9 trillion, according to Forbes.
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The most expensive divorce to date was filed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife, MacKenzie. The couple’s $38 billion breakup, which reportedly involved $140 billion in assets, was finalized in 2019 after Jeff Bezos was revealed to be having an affair with media personality Lauren Sanchez.
