One was a charming and urbane New York financier around whom beautiful young women hovered like bees to honey. The other was the socially awkward nerd whose idea of a wild night seemed to be a marathon computer-coding session.
The precise relationship between paedophile money man Jeffrey Epstein and billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has long been shrouded in mystery.
Yet an unflattering new biography of Gates offers fresh insight into his troubling four-year relationship with the late, disgraced millionaire sex offender.
According to business writer Anupreeta Das, while the tech genius was certainly attracted to women many years his junior – to the point that his company banned interns from being alone with him – what he desired even more was the Nobel Peace Prize as recognition of his foundation’s work towards eradicating polio.
An unflattering new biography of Gates, right, offers fresh insight into his troubling four-year friendship with the late, disgraced millionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, left
Das, the former finance editor of the New York Times – so hardly a hack operator – says in the book that it was this lofty dream that paedophile Epstein exploited in order to ‘tunnel his way into the philanthropist’s orbit’ and establish a toxic collaboration that would eventually destroy Gates’s 27-year marriage to his long-suffering wife Melinda.
She argues that what started as a mutually beneficial philanthropic alliance in 2011 morphed into a relationship which saw Gates repeatedly visit the convicted sex offender’s homes – despite having been warned about the sordid history of a man who had already served a prison sentence in Florida after being convicted in 2008 of procuring a child for prostitution.
Since Epstein’s death in 2019 exposed the extent of his connections to dozens of rich and famous men, Gates, 68, has expressed his ‘deep regret for ever meeting Epstein’. He insists their dealings were only ever related to philanthropy.
Bill and Melinda Gates married in 1994. She filed for divorce in 2021
Epstein regarded Gates – then the world’s richest man and still worth an estimated £100 billion – as the ‘brightest star’ in his ‘dark universe’, Das says.
As we shall see, Gates offered Epstein a new way to make millions of dollars, meet potential clients and, by basking in the glory of the tech tycoon’s huge philanthropy operation, clean up his contemptible image.
But Das argues in Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King: Bill Gates And His Quest To Shape Our World that the bespectacled Gates also had a reputation in need of repair.
For in the 1980s and 1990s, as Gates pushed Microsoft to global dominance with ruthless and abrasive drive, the company ‘was well known for hiring skimpily dressed performers and escorts to weave their way through the guests at company parties or industry events’. She writes that notoriously ‘flirty’ Gates was ‘like a kid in a candy store’ with pretty young Microsoft interns.
Gates has reacted disdainfully to Das’s book, the latest in a string of attacks in recent years on a man who was once held up as almost a living saint for the billions his foundation spent on alleviating poverty, malnutrition and disease.
Gates (pictured in his younger years) has become widely celebrated as a technology genius and trailblazing philanthropist
His spokesman said in a statement: ‘Relying almost exclusively on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources, the book includes highly sensationalised allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts Mr Gates’s office provided to the author on numerous occasions.’
While Gates’s reputation has been tarnished by myriad controversies – ranging from complaints about his overbearing behaviour as a boss to allegations that his charitable giving is actually deeply self-serving by benefiting companies in which his foundation invests – his relationship with Epstein, who committed suicide in a New York jail cell before he could be tried for sex trafficking, remains the darkest stain against his character.
The wheels of this regrettable association were put into motion almost two decades before the two men actually met. It was in 1992 that Epstein approached an attractive young woman named Melanie Walker at New York’s Plaza Hotel and told her she could be a model.
Many young women fell for this well-used Epstein opening gambit, which involved him boasting that he was an adviser to Les Wexner, the billionaire owner of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie empire, and that he could arrange an audition for them to be one of its famous ‘Angels’.
The Prince of Wales with the tech billionaire during the Breakthrough Energy Summit earlier this summer
Walker, however, had graduated from the University of Texas only six months earlier and was destined to become a brain surgeon. She declined his offer, although they remained in close touch.
After finishing at medical school, she stayed in a Manhattan apartment he owned whenever she came to New York.
Walker later married a senior Microsoft executive, Steven Sinofsky, and in 2006 herself went to work for Gates at his foundation. She and the foundation’s chief science adviser, Boris Nikolic, who also knew Epstein through his generous patronage of scientific research, were able to reassure Gates that he should ignore the ‘consternation of some foundation employees’ and meet the convicted paedophile.
Gates agreed and in January 2011 he met Epstein at the financier’s imposing seven-floor Upper East Side mansion – reportedly the biggest private residence in New York. The Microsoft boss enjoyed himself so much that he accepted another invitation the following May.
At the time Gates was unofficially campaigning for the charity foundation he ran with his wife Melinda to win the Nobel Peace Prize for its relentless work towards eradicating polio. Epstein told Gates he could help the foundation achieve that.
Melinda had allegedly made clear to her husband that she wanted him to have nothing to do with the loathsome Epstein
In 2013, Epstein and Gates flew to Strasbourg to meet with the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize committee. It came to nothing – no prize for Gates was forthcoming – but Epstein had already offered another attractive proposal.
He outlined how he could assist Gates’s philanthropic mission.
(In 2010, Gates and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett launched their ‘Giving Pledge’, promising to hand over the majority of their vast fortunes to good causes and asking other tycoons to do the same.)
Gates was taken with Epstein’s plan that they set up a fund to help billionaires quietly give away their money to health initiatives. Epstein stood to make millions from a cut of the fees charged to administer the fund and, notes author Anupreeta Das, his involvement would also introduce him to a lucrative stream of billionaires whose fortunes he might be able to manage.
Curiously, says Das, in one of his emails explaining the planned fund, Epstein implied that it guaranteed an anonymity that would whitewash his association with Gates.
The Microsoft founder in the early 1990s, almost 20 years after the company was founded
He said it would not only avoid ‘upsetting’ Gates Foundation staff who were concerned about Epstein but also Gates’s wife Melinda, who had already made clear to her husband that she wanted him to have nothing to do with the loathsome convicted criminal.
Melinda (who since their divorce in 2021 now calls herself French Gates, using her maiden name) says she only met Epstein once, in 2013, when she and Gates were in New York to receive a public service award.
She says she was curious to know what Epstein was like. At a dinner at his mansion, says Das, Melinda was ‘unsettled’ the moment she walked through the door to be met by a wall plastered in signed photos of his famous male friends and, by the marble staircase, female figurines, ‘some of them suggestively dressed’.
Meanwhile, a lifesize female doll hung from a chandelier. She ‘sat uncomfortably throughout the dinner, and later told friends she was furious that her then-husband would not cut off ties with [Epstein],’ says Das. Melinda has since described Epstein as ‘abhorrent’ and ‘evil personified’.
Just as with the Nobel Prize plan, the fund came to nothing. Yet Gates would continue to see Epstein until 2014.
Epstein reportedly tried to blackmail Gates about an alleged 2010 affair he had with 20- something Mila Antonova (pictured), a Russian bridge player
It was a decision that displayed a ‘surprising’ lack of judgment, Das claims, given the warnings he’d had from Melinda and from the ‘media battalions’ at his foundation and business empire ‘who are paid to maintain the philanthropist’s upstanding public profile and brief him on the backgrounds and expertise of the people he meets’.
According to Das, staff at Gates Ventures, his business arm, did alert him to Epstein’s sordid past, easily discoverable with a simple Google search, but he ‘either chose not to listen or made the trade-off that Epstein could offer him something that was worth putting aside the image risk’.
Although Gates has insisted he never had either a ‘business relationship or friendship’ with Epstein, Das says the Microsoft co-founder once told an associate that Epstein was a ‘buddy’.
They are estimated to have met at least six times, including three times at Epstein’s Manhattan home, Gates once staying there late into the night. Gates, who praised his host’s ‘charm and intelligence’ to others, also visited Epstein’s Florida home but never went to his Caribbean private island, dubbed ‘Orgy Island’ and the scene of some of the paedophile’s worst offences.
Gates flew at least once on one of Epstein’s private planes, despite having at least two of his own and vowing once never to use another person’s jet.
A Polish model who says she was one of Epstein’s victims claimed last year that when she was in her 20s, she flew with Epstein to meet Gates at his Microsoft office in Seattle after he promised her he could get her a job at the Gates Foundation. She says Epstein took a photo of her with Gates.
And three years after the pair’s last meeting, Epstein reportedly tried to blackmail Gates about an alleged 2010 affair he had with 20-something Mila Antonova, a Russian bridge player. (Gates is an avid player of the card game.)
Jeffrey Epstein took his own life in a New York jail cell while awaiting trial for sex trafficking
She was one of several young women who occasionally stayed at Epstein’s New York mansion after being introduced to him by a Gates adviser.
Epstein later paid for Antonova to go on a computer coding course and reportedly emailed Gates in 2017 asking to be reimbursed for the course.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the ‘tone of the message was that Epstein knew about the affair and could expose it’.
What was the attraction to Epstein on Bill’s side? Based on what he admitted to others, Das believes that Epstein’s ‘larger-than-life behaviour was an adventure for Gates’, who chafed at his own over-scheduled and conventional life with Melinda and their three children.
He told a colleague in 2011 that Epstein’s ‘lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me’.
Meanwhile, Epstein dropped Gates’s name whenever he could. In an inquiry by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) into the university’s ties to Epstein, Gates was mentioned in thousands of emails between Epstein and MIT staff, insiders told Das.
Though Das says Bill cheated on Melinda many times with young women at Microsoft, Gates’s approaches to women were ‘clumsy rather than predatory’ and often based on his misinterpreting their interest in him.
Gates is ‘not Harvey Weinstein’, a former Microsoft executive told the author, while someone who saw some of his ‘flirtatious emails’ described them as ‘cringeworthy’.
But by the time Melinda reluctantly filed for divorce in 2021, says Das, she had long been ‘seething’ about his infidelity and ‘about the unequal nature of her marriage to a man heralded globally as a technology genius and trailblazing philanthropist’.
Now, thanks largely to his disastrously misjudged dalliance with Jeffrey Epstein, Gates’s once glittering prestige seems to be permanently tarnished.
