Bill Gates Addresses His Reported Friendship With Jeffrey Epstein

Bill Gates is finally addressing his reported friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“In retrospect, I was foolish to spend any time with him. And he, sort of, got time with various people by spending time with other people,” Gates, 69, told the Wall Street Journal in a wide-ranging interview published on Friday, January 24. “So yes, I think I was quite stupid. I thought it would help me with global health philanthropy. In fact, it failed to do that it was just a huge mistake.”

Gates went on to say that the controversies surrounding Epstein prior to his 2019 arrest and subsequent death in August of the same year have made him more cautious about meeting new people now. “Definitely,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “I mean, are you kidding?”

In 2022 Gates’ ex-wife Melinda French Gates cited his alleged relationship with Epstein as one of the factors that led to their divorce. “It’s not one thing, it was many things. But I did not like that he’d had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein,” she told CBS Mornings at the time. “I made that clear to him.”

French Gates also told Gayle King she met with Epstein “exactly one time” so she could get an understanding of what he was like. “I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door,” she added. “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. I had nightmares about it afterwards. … It was awful, and he was awful.”

Authorities began to investigate allegations of sexual abuse against Epstein in 2005. Three years later he was convicted of hiring an underage girl for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute. He spent 13 months in prison before he was arrested again in July 2019 on federal charges of sex trafficking involving minors. He died by suicide while incarcerated at the age of 66 one month after his arrest.

His friendship with Epstein is not the only relationship Gates is revisiting. In an interview with The Times of London published on Saturday, January 25, Gabes described his divorce from French Gates as “the mistake I regret the most.”

He tried to imitate his own parents’ marriage, he added, with his own. “I encouraged Melinda to be a little calmer than my mother was, but we were both quite driven. I spent more time with the kids than my dad did, but the ratio was still 10:1, with Melinda doing most things for the kids. We had a great time.”

Gates also said he thinks there is a “certain wonderfulness to spending your entire adult life with one person.” He added, “When Melinda and I met, I was fairly successful but not ridiculously successful — that came during the time that we were together. So, she saw me through a lot. 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.”

Apart from the divorce, he also said, he’s experienced other failures — “but none that mattered.”