How Bill Gates's Carefully Curated Geek Image Unraveled In Two Weeks

Over the past two decades, Bill Gates trampolined off his and his wife Melinda's vast charitable efforts to another stratosphere of societal influence.

Before all the revelations about his divorce, dubious workplace behavior and ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates was just America's huggable billionaire techno-philanthropist. Sure, he had accumulated absurd riches from cofounding Microsoft Corp. and lived in a $130 million mansion with an indoor trampoline room. But he was also known to drive his kids to school, binge Modern Family, dress like Ned Flanders and wait in line for his favorite cheeseburgers. There was power in Gates's air of down-to-earth dad-dorkdom. Lots of one-percenters donate big to vital causes; few achieve Reddit AMA relatability. Over the past two decades, Gates trampolined off his and his wife Melinda's vast charitable efforts to another stratosphere of societal influence. He became arguably the leading business voice on fixing the world's woes, as comfy pontificating about eradicating disease and improving education systems on the Ellen DeGeneres Show as he was advocating for climate change and Covid-19 solutions on Fox News.  That populist persona popped on May 3, when Bill and Melinda French Gates announced they were splitting up after 27 years of marriage. Unflattering particulars quickly emerged, including reports that Bill had an extramarital affair and pursued other office romances with employees at Microsoft and the humanitarian foundation that carries their names. In a divorce filing, Melinda said their relationship was "irretrievably 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 heyday of the PC revolution, he was the ruthless nerd-turned-tycoon who brutally and profanely berated underlings and allegedly tried to slash Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's equity in the company while he was undergoing cancer treatment in the early 1980s. (Gates has said his recollection of events differed from Allen's.) Windows software, his flagship creation, was a buggy mess that frustrated millions of consumers, and Steve Jobs groused that Gates and his team showed "no shame" and "no taste" in ripping off Apple's products. Even the judge who oversaw Microsoft's crippling turn-of-the-century monopoly trial said Gates had "a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success."