Critics like Peter Thiel, who is not a signatory, have derided the Giving Pledge initiative as an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club” and privately urged fellow billionaires — including Elon Musk — to abandon the pledge, according to the New York Times.

Thiel told Musk that he should pull out of the initiative because his money would go “to left-wing nonprofits that will be chosen by Bill Gates,” the Times reported, citing a recent speech that Thiel gave.

Bill Gates co-founded the Giving Pledge in 2010 alongside Warren Buffett and Melinda French Gates, urging the world’s wealthiest individuals to donate the majority of their fortunes to charity. AFP via Getty Images

Gates has come under fire in recent weeks after he admitted to cheating on his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, with two Russian women that he met through the late Epstein.

The pledge has also drawn criticism from some tech investors who argue that modern philanthropy has become intertwined with progressive politics.

Critics say many of the nonprofits and foundations favored by major donors — particularly those tied to global health, climate initiatives and diversity programs — reflect left-leaning priorities, fueling claims that the Giving Pledge has become associated with “woke” causes rather than politically neutral charity.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has argued that philanthropy once functioned as a kind of reputational bargain for billionaires — allowing them to “wash away all of your sins” and be recast as virtuous donors.

Since then, however, that social contract has broken down as criticism of the tech sector has intensified.

Bill Gates has faced scrutiny over his past meetings with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a controversy that later emerged as a factor in the breakdown of his marriage to Melinda French Gates. DOJ

Peter Thiel, who never signed the Giving Pledge, has mocked the initiative as an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club” and urged fellow billionaires to reconsider their participation. Getty Images for The Cambridge Union

Brian Armstrong, the billionaire founder of Coinbase, quietly exited the initiative in 2024 — removing his name from the pledge’s website five years after signing on, the Times reported.

Even some early supporters are said to be rethinking their commitments.

Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder and one of the original signatories, said last year he was “amending” his pledge to focus more heavily on for-profit research ventures, the Times reported.

Critics have argued the undertaking lacks teeth, noting it carries no enforcement mechanism and does not track how much money signatories actually donate — allowing billionaires to fulfill the promise decades later through their estates.

Larry Ellison, an original Giving Pledge signatory and Oracle co-founder, said last year he was “amending” his pledge to focus more heavily on for-profit research ventures. Getty Images

Skeptics also note that much of the pledged wealth is routed into private foundations or donor-advised funds, vehicles that can allow billions to sit for years before reaching operating charities, the Times reported.

Taryn Jensen, the interim head of The Giving Pledge, defended the initiative, telling The Post in a statement that debate over philanthropy is “inevitable and welcome” and noting the campaign now includes more than 250 donors across 30 countries — many of whom “have already met their commitments or are steadily working toward them.”

Jensen added the goal is to keep “building a culture where giving is the norm” while helping signatories turn their pledges “into action.”

Launched in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett, the pledge asks the world’s wealthiest people to commit to giving away the majority of their fortunes to charity either during their lifetimes or after death.

Warren Buffett, who launched the Giving Pledge with Bill and Melinda French Gates in 2010, said he still considers the initiative “quite a success.” REUTERS

Bill Gates has said Epstein — who died by suicide in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges — was one of the factors behind his split from his wife of 27 years.

Gates has acknowledged meeting Epstein several times after the latter’s 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor, saying he regretted the encounters.

French Gates stepped away from the foundation that administers the Giving Pledge in 2024, three years after the divorce.

Brian Armstrong, the billionaire founder of Coinbase, quietly exited the Giving Pledge in 2024 after signing the initiative five years earlier. AFP via Getty Images

“I firmly believe in the Giving Pledge and consider it quite a success, though my physical limitations have eliminated my participation in the annual get-together,” the 95-year-old Buffett, who recently stepped down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, told the Times.

“I have continued to contact possible members but only on a minor scale in recent years. Bill Gates has continued major efforts.”

French Gates has acknowledged that the results of the pledge have been uneven. She recently told Wired that some participants have donated at a “massive scale,” while others have moved more slowly.

Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates co-founded the Giving Pledge with Warren Buffett to encourage billionaires to give away most of their wealth during their lifetimes or through their estates. AP

“Some are doing it, and some are trying or aren’t ready to,” she said.

French Gates added that the initiative has not progressed as far as she once hoped.

“I wish we had been even more successful with the Pledge than we have been to date,” she said. “It’s a problem to continue working on.”

The Post has sought comment from Gates, French Gates, Thiel, Ellison, Armstrong and Buffett.

The post Billionaires bolt from Bill Gates’ scandal-scarred Giving Pledge as critics brand it ‘Epstein-adjacent’ appeared first on Our Story Insight.

The $7.88 billion donation was made in 2024 to the Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation, a relatively new nonprofit launched by French Gates, according to a newly released tax filing reviewed by The New York Times’ DealBook.

Bill Gates paid nearly $8 billion to his ex-wife, Melinda. Nathan Posner/Shutterstock

The filing marks the first time concrete financial terms of the Gateses’ 2021 divorce have been made public following their decision to formally separate their philanthropic work in 2024.

Melinda Gates announced she and her husband were splitting up in 2021. Getty Images for The Clooney Foundation For Justice

Melinda and Bill Gates with their children in an undated photo. Instagram

French Gates had said when she stepped down as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that she would have an additional $12.5 billion to commit to causes focused on women and families, as per the terms of the divorce settlement.

The post Bill Gates sends $8B to ex-wife Melinda’s charity in one of largest divorce-related payouts ever appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Earlier this week, Gates released “Three Tough Truths About Climate,” a memo that marked a striking departure from his previous advocacy. He wrote that ultimately global warming “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and suggested “we should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature.”

Such sentiments mark a dramatic change from his 2021 book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” It predicted that “we are going to have a catastrophic warming of the planet” if we don’t reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

In a memo this week, Bill Gates acknowledged that ultimately global warming “will not lead to humanity’s demise.” REUTERS

Climate tech entrepreneurs and investors are cheering Gates’ new perspective.

Garrett Boudinot, founder of Vycarb, a startup developing low-carbon building materials for the construction industry, said Gates voiced something that he and his peers in clean energy have felt but haven’t seen amplified.

“He captured the optimism we know and feel,” Boudinot told me, adding that the memo “blew up [his] inbox” with interest.

This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC’s power players (and those who aspire to be).

He noted that potential advancements, like next-gen geothermal, an inexpensive technology harnessing the earth’s heat, seemed like far off pipe dreams not long ago. Now, they could be a reality quite soon. “These possibilities were viewed as a thing of the distant future and science fiction… they are solutions now.”

Andrew Beebe, managing director at climate technology fund Obvious Ventures, said Gates’ memo represents a crucial move away from climate paralysis.

Bill Gates’ pivot has been met with skepticism but also appreciated by those in climate tech who say it is a rejection of the “doomer mentality.” Getty Images

“We’re shifting from a doomer mentality,” Beebe told me. “We can build a resilient American future … Positioning things about climate as opportunity is a better way to talk about it.”

The progress that climate innovators have made over the last few years is already visible, according to Beebe. “We are making leaps and bounds in progress at the technological level,” he said.

Implicit in the Gates memo would seem to be the idea that the private sector and free market can find solutions to climate change. It can also be viewed as an embrace of the “abundance” mindset, so popular in tech, that believes we can create solutions using human ingenuity rather than simply imposing restrictions.

After all, what is the point of innovating and striving to do better if we’re all just careening toward a fiery apocalypse?

Data centers, which house the computing power necessary for artificial intelligence, consume vast amounts of energy but are ultimately necessary as the US aims to compete in the AI race. Hollandse Hoogte/Shutterstock

A spokesperson for Gates denied that the memo was a reversal of his previous stance on climate change. It “remains the same as it has always been,” the spokesperson said. “The essay builds on that view. It argues that climate and development must be tackled together and that innovation is the path to achieving both.”

While critics on the right like Kari Lake and Liz Churchill have rolled their eyes that Gates has finally come around — after they were slammed as climate deniers for decades — I’d argue that his shift represents the return of reason to the dialogue and is ultimately something to be applauded. 

It is also coming at a time when we shouldn’t be quibbling over the past but rather focusing on prioritizing AI innovation and keeping up with China’s efforts — a race that is fundamentally about power and energy.

In fact, AI’s massive energy demands have created an uncomfortable reality: Meeting emission targets while building the computing infrastructure needed to compete with China may be impossible.

While some remain skeptical about Gates and his memo, conservative climate advocate Sarah Hunt gave the Microsoft mogul some credit.

“When is the last time you had a billionaire come out and say ‘I’m wrong’? Give him props for it,” she told me. “He has no reason to make this statement — he has plenty of money, he doesn’t need to curry favor, he doesn’t have an incentive to be disingenuous.”

The post Business leaders cheer Bill Gates ditching climate doom appeared first on Our Story Insight.

The older he gets, the more Bill Gates is surprised by what the world dishes up.

Take billionaires. There are many now from the tech industry, quite a few with politics that skew forcefully right.

“I always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center,” Mr. Gates said. “The fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me.”

Or take the evolution of technology in the decades since he began Microsoft and made it one of the world’s most valuable companies.

“Incredible things happened because of sharing information on the internet,” Mr. Gates said. That much he anticipated. But once social media companies like Facebook and Twitter came along, “you see ills that I have to say I did not predict.”

Political divisiveness accelerated by technology? “I didn’t predict that would happen,” he said. Technology being used as a weapon against the broader public interests? “I didn’t predict that,” he said.

Mr. Gates is a techno-optimist but he has limits, like cryptocurrency. Does it have any use?

“None,” he said. “There are people with high I.Q.s who have fooled themselves on that one.”

Even artificial intelligence, which Mr. Gates has spoken of enthusiastically, and which Microsoft is heavily invested in, produces a few qualms. “Now we have to worry about bad people using A.I.,” he said. (The New York Times has sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI over copyright infringement; the companies have denied the claims.)

Mr. Gates, who turns 70 this year, is looking back a lot these days. Next week he is publishing “Source Code: My Beginnings,” which examines his childhood. The first of three projected volumes of memoirs, the book has been in the works for at least a decade but arrives at an unusual moment, as the tech billionaires have been unleashed. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg — their success has given them power that they are enthusiastically, even gleefully, using in divisive ways.

“Source Code: My Beginnings,” which examines Bill Gates’s childhood, is the first of three projected volumes of memoirs.

Thirty years ago, Mr. Gates created the model for the in-your-face tech billionaire. Microsoft in the 1990s supplied the operating system for the personal computers that were increasingly in every home and office, and the company had big plans for this new thing called the web. Mr. Gates and his company were perceived as powerful, ruthless and ubiquitous. Silicon Valley was terrified and even regulators were alarmed, suing Microsoft.

The anti-Microsoft sentiment in popular culture peaked with the 2001 movie “Antitrust,” about a tech chief executive who murders people in his quest for world domination. Reviewers underlined the allusions to Mr. Gates, although they largely panned the film.

The ire is long gone and Mr. Gates has no recollection of “Antitrust.” Among billionaires who generate strong emotions, he said with a hint of relief, “I’m not at the top of the list. The current tech titans would elicit a stronger negative reaction.”

He is a counterpoint to the moguls in the news. “We don’t have a club,” he said. “Nor do we have consensus. Reid Hoffman” — the co-founder of LinkedIn, a Microsoft board member and vocal supporter of former Vice President Kamala Harris — “is a billionaire. You can ask for his point of view. He’ll be glad to critique.”

Mr. Hoffman, who The Times reported in November was considering leaving the country after Ms. Harris’s election loss, did not respond to emails asking for his point of view. But plenty of others in Silicon Valley are watching the transformation of the billionaires into would-be overlords with a horrified fascination.

“It’s a steady subject of dismal conversation around here,” said Paul Saffo, a longtime tech forecaster. “The consensus is that Bill Gates looks sainted compared to the awfulness afoot.”

When we talked a few weeks ago, Mr. Gates was sitting on the other side of an office table in a rented suite in Indian Wells, Calif., next to the resort town of Palm Springs. Why were we here? It was cold in Seattle, still Mr. Gates’s home when he is not on the move. That was reason enough.

Despite giving many billions of dollars to the Gates Foundation, his philanthropic juggernaut, Mr. Gates remains the 12th-richest person in the world, with personal wealth of over $100 billion, according to Forbes. But his physique isn’t jacked, he does not have his own rocket fleet, and he seems eager to point out that he does not have all the answers.

After we spoke, Mr. Gates was going to President Carter’s funeral. President Carter was an inspiration and a partner; Mr. Gates’s foundation became a big funder of the Carter Center.

In some respects, they resembled each other. Mr. Gates and Mr. Carter each had two distinct careers, both of which took place in the public eye over years. After Mr. Carter was president, he spent more than 40 years doing good works at home and abroad. That second act tended to be reviewed more favorably than the first.

So too with Mr. Gates, although his divorce from Melinda French Gates in 2021 was a decided setback for his reputation. There was also an unseemly relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“In India, Japan, China, the American dream is a vaunted thing, of which I am sort of an example,” Mr. Gates said. “And then there’s people who think there shouldn’t be billionaires. There’s people who think I use vaccines to kill children. There’s quite a range of opinions.”

Should billionaires be outlawed?

Mr. Gates is the opposite of the reclusive billionaire hidden away on his estate. He recently brought out his second Netflix series, “What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates.”

The fourth of the five episodes, “Can You Be Too Rich?” had people, including Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, saying definitively yes. It was a mild but real form of self-criticism that few other billionaires would subject themselves to.

Working on the show didn’t change his mind, though. “Should we outlaw billionaires?” Mr. Gates asked. “My answer to that, and you can say I’m biased, is no.”

But he supports a tax system that is more progressive. Every year, he adds up the taxes he has paid over his lifetime. He figures he has paid $14 billion, “not counting sales tax.”

Under a better system, he calculates, he would have paid $40 billion. Released in September, “Can You Be Too Rich?” already seems from another era. The answer to Mr. Gates’s question, in an administration staffed by billionaires, is no.

Mr. Gates tries to be nonpolitical but he thought the consequences of the 2024 election were so significant he got involved financially for the first time. He gave $50 million to Future Forward, the principal outside fund-raising group supporting Ms. Harris, The Times reported in October. He didn’t talk publicly about it then and won’t now.

After our conversation, it came out that he had a three-hour dinner with the president-elect at the time, Donald J. Trump, about world health challenges like H.I.V. and polio. “He showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up,” Mr. Gates told The Wall Street Journal.

This week the Trump administration created confusion over whether it would stop disbursing H.I.V. medications bought with U.S. aid. A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates declined to comment.

“I will engage this administration just like I did the first Trump administration as best I can,” Mr. Gates said in our interview.

A trial to his parents

Writing an autobiography is another way Mr. Gates is different from his peers, few of whom seem so introspective. His childhood, in an upper-class enclave in Seattle in the 1960s and early 1970s, is not inherently dramatic.

“A lot of people have the story of what a tough childhood they had, and how that is partly why they’re so competitive,” he said. “I don’t have that.”

What he did have was his mother, Mary Gates. She was remarkably accomplished in an era when most upper-class women were encouraged by society to stay home. The first woman president of King County’s United Way, she later was on the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she was the first woman to run it.

“She was almost too intense for me,” Mr. Gates said. His father, a lawyer, was more removed but was drawn into the battle of wills.

There was a period when Bill — he was in sixth grade — was supremely difficult. “I could go days without speaking, emerging from my room only for meals and school,” he writes in “Source Code.” “Call me to dinner, I ignored you. Tell me to pick up my clothes, nope. Clear the table — nothing.”

“I was provoking them,” he said in our interview. “I didn’t think they had any logic for why I had to show respect for them. My mom was pretty pushy about ‘Eat this way,’ and ‘Have these manners,’ and ‘If you’re going to use the ketchup you have to put the ketchup in a bowl and have to put the bowl here.’ She thought of me as pretty sloppy. Because I was.”

It was not really about the ketchup, of course. “I didn’t have any negative feelings toward her but I could pretend to not care what she said in a way that definitely irritated her,” he said. “What was I trying to prove?”

Parents then could not keep tabs on their children if the children were determined. His sister Kristi, he remembers, “was wary of what might go wrong. Whereas I’m like, ‘Hey, what could go wrong?’” Bill spent much of his time programming, often sneaking away at night.

Then something did go wrong, at the end of his junior year in high school. His best friend, Kent, was mountain climbing, fell and died.

“It was Kent being an independent thinker, pushing his limits,” Mr. Gates said. “His parents worried about him and he was not naturally coordinated. And yet he seemed to be enjoying it and they didn’t stand in his way.”

What Mr. Gates learned from the tragedy was that life can be unfairly bad as well as unfairly good. He was very lucky; Kent was very unlucky.

Mr. Gates said that if his teenage self were diagnosed now, he would probably be told he was on the spectrum. Maybe his mother intuitively understood what he needed. “I wanted to exceed her expectations,” he said. “She was pretty good at always raising the bar.”

Raising the bar is what he consistently did when he and his friend Paul Allen started a company in Albuquerque in 1975 to produce software for the Altair 8800, a rudimentary personal computer. Mr. Gates was barely out of his teens. He soon moved the fledgling operation to the Seattle area, closer to his mother.

Stewart Alsop covered Mr. Gates when he was the editor of InfoWorld, an influential tech magazine of the era. “Bill gave the privilege of having dinner with him solo in Seattle every six months; the price was always coming up with something he hadn’t thought of,” Mr. Alsop said. That was easy as “he had a hard time seeing the world outside of his life.”

If Mr. Gates is on the spectrum, he now thinks it gave Microsoft an edge. “I didn’t believe in weekends; I didn’t believe in vacations,” he once said. He knew the license plate numbers of his employees so he could check if they tried to go home. It was a model for thousands of tech start-ups to come.

On the downhill side

“Source Code” ends with the beginning of Microsoft. Spreadsheets, databases and word processing were primitive tools, but users got an edge in productivity. The future would be better. “We really didn’t see much downside,” Mr. Gates said.

He kept his optimism for a long time. In 2017, he reviewed the book “Homo Deus,” by the Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Mr. Gates took issue with the author’s warning about a potential future where the elite upgrade themselves through tech and the masses are left to rot. “This future is not preordained,” Mr. Gates wrote.

Now he is reading Mr. Harari’s latest book. “Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to A.I.” is a critical analysis of our reliance on technology.

“Every smartphone contains more information than the ancient Library of Alexandria and enables its owner to instantaneously connect to billions of other people throughout the world,” Mr. Harari writes. “Yet with all this information circulating at breathtaking speeds, humanity is closer than ever to annihilating itself.”

Mr. Gates took “Nexus” personally. Mr. Harari “makes fun of people like myself who saw more information as always a good thing,” Mr. Gates said. “I would basically say he’s right and I was wrong.”

(Mr. Harari was unavailable for comment because he was attending a meditation course.)

To be clear, Mr. Gates is not apologizing. He remains a believer in the power and goodness of tech. But for all he resisted them initially, his mother’s lessons are evidently still with him. Mind your manners. Try and do good. And try not to get carried away.

As a billionaire, other people invest you with huge powers, Mr. Gates said. Because you are successful in one sphere, he mused, “they think you’re good at lots of things you’re not good at.”

It almost sounded like a warning.

Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.

The post Bill Gates Isn’t Like Those Other Tech Billionaires appeared first on Our Story Insight.

“The divorce thing was miserable for me and Melinda for at least two years,” Bill told The Times of London on Saturday.

The Microsoft co-founder had hoped his marriage to Melinda would be as successful as his parents Bill Sr. and Mary, who lived together for 45 years.

“There is a certain wonderfulness to spending your entire adult life with one person because of the memories and depth of things you have done and having kids together,” Gates said.

Bill admitted divorcing Melinda is “the mistake I regret the most.”
Getty Images for Robin Hood

Bill said he would have to put the public divorce “at the top of the list” of his failures throughout his life.

“There are others but none that matter,” the philanthropist added.

The couple met in 1987 during a Microsoft sales meeting when Melinda was a product manager and Bill was the company’s CEO.

He reportedly asked her out on a date in a parking lot.

The couple met in 1987 during a Microsoft sales meeting.
Getty Images

Bill and Melinda Gates got divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage. Getty Images

They got married on New Year’s Day in 1994 and went on to share kids Jennifer, 28, Rory, 25, and Phoebe, 22

“When Melinda and I met, I was fairly successful but not ridiculously successful — that came during the time that we were together,” the 69-year-old said. “So, she saw me through a lot.”

In 2021, Bill and Melinda announced their divorce after secretly separating the year before, saying they could no longer “grow together as a couple in this next phase of life.”

“When we got divorced it was tough and then she made the decision to leave the foundation — I was disappointed that she took the option to go off,” Bill said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world, changed its name to The Gates Foundation when Melinda resigned in 2024 a few years after the split.

Bill admitted that he “caused pain” to his family when “Today” show anchor Savannah Guthrie asked the tech leader if infidelity played a role in the divorce during a 2022 interview — but didn’t share too many details.

That same year, Melinda went on “CBS Mornings” and hinted that her then-husband’s working relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was also a factor in their split.

“I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” Melinda said. “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified.”

When Melinda, 60, filed the divorce papers, Bill was worth $130 billion.

“The divorce thing was miserable for me and Melinda for at least two years,” the billionaire shared. Getty Images

The couple did not have a prenup but they did have a “separation agreement” to lay out the terms of the split.

In 2023, Bill started dating Paula Hurd, a former tech executive at NCR Global and widow of Oracle CEO Mark Hurd.

Melinda went public with her boyfriend entrepreneur Philip Vaughn in October 2024.

“Melinda and I still see each other — we have three kids and two grandchildren so there are family events. The kids are doing well. They have good values,” Bill said.

The post Bill Gates calls divorcing wife Melinda Gates ‘the mistake I regret the most’ appeared first on Our Story Insight.