By Nicholas Kulish, David Gelles, Anupreeta Das and Kate Kelly May 14, 2021 fortune of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates exceeds the size of Morocco’s annual economy, combines the value of Ford, Twitter and Marriott International and is triple the endowment of Harvard. While few know how their wealth will be divided in the divorce, one thing is clear: breaking it up can’t be easy. Gates built one of the great fortunes in human history when he founded Microsoft in 1975 with Paul Allen. The couple’s net worth is estimated to be more than $US124 billion ($161 billion), and includes assets as varied as trophy real estate, public company stocks and rare artefacts. Melinda and Bill Gates announced last week they are divorcing after 27 years of marriage. CREDIT:GETTY IMAGES There’s a big stake in the luxury Four Seasons hotel chain. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and ranch land, including Buffalo Bill’s historic Wyoming ranch. There are billions of dollars’ worth of shares in companies like AutoNation and Waste Management. There’s a beachfront mansion in Southern California. And one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. “The amount of money and the diversity of assets that are involved in this divorce boggles the imagination,” said David Aronson, a lawyer who has represented wealthy clients in divorce cases. “There have rarely been cases that are even close to this in size.” Only the 2019 divorce between the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his now ex-wife, the novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, was bigger. Bezos had an estimated fortune of $US137 billion, though mostly in Amazon stock, and Scott kept 4 per cent of Amazon’s shares, worth $US36 billion at the time. But Gates has for decades been diversifying his holdings; he owns just 1.3 per cent of Microsoft. Instead, his stock portfolio includes stakes in dozens of publicly traded companies. He is the largest private owner of farmland in the country, according to The Land Report. In addition to the Four Seasons, he has stakes in other luxury hotels and a company that caters to private jet owners. His real estate portfolio includes one of the largest houses in the country and several equestrian facilities. He owns stakes in a clean energy investment fund and a nuclear energy startup. There is also the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Separate from the rest of the Gates fortune, with an endowment of $US50 billion, the foundation is one of the world’s largest charitable organisations and plays a uniquely important role in global public health. The endowment is in a trust and cannot be divided as part of the marital estate, though questions remain about whether it will be the main recipient of their charitable contributions once the split is complete. The couple has a separation agreement in place, according to the divorce filing by French Gates, but the details are not disclosed. The filing asks the court to divide their real estate, personal property and debts according to the terms set forth in that agreement. Lawyers for French Gates have been working on a plan for separating some of the assets since 2019, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Divorce lawyers not working on the Gates split say some of the personal assets could be hard to value, hard to separate and highly complex. Some of the wealth has already been divided: Soon after the announcement, $US2.4 billion worth of shares in AutoNation, Canadian National Railway and two Mexican companies belonging to the couple were transferred to French Gates — making her a billionaire in her own right. An itemised list might be harder to come by. Bill and Melinda Gates have announced they are getting a divorce after 27 years of marriage. “Divorces are actually one of the times that things crack open and the light shines in,” said Chuck Collins, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and author of The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. But he added that prenuptial agreements and settlements were designed for privacy. “Parts of a prenup are about nondisclosure about all the family trusts and things,” he said. “They’ve got that all lined up before you fall in love.” At the same time, lawyers point out that the issues that cause friction in the average divorce are completely absent for the stratospherically wealthy. “It’s almost easier to settle a case like this, if the parties are inclined to do so, than it is to settle a case where people live comfortably, but don’t have enough to live comfortably once they split everything in half,” Aronson said. “For these people, it will only change to the extent of how many billions of dollars they can give away to whatever they want.” A secretively managed fortune At the centre of both the Gates fortune and the Gates Foundation endowment is a little-known entity called Cascade Investment. Based in Kirkland, Washington, and run by Michael Larson, a former bond fund manager for Putnam Investments, Cascade has overseen both the endowment and most of the personal wealth of Gates and French Gates for decades. Gates began reducing his stake in Microsoft beginning with the initial public offering in 1986, when he owned 45 per cent of the company, a stake worth $US350 million at the time. Today, he has an estimated net worth of $US124 billion, according to Forbes, or $US146 billion, according to the research firm Wealth-X. Including the Gates Foundation’s endowment and the Gates personal fortune, Cascade most likely oversees assets that put it on par or beyond some of the world’s biggest hedge funds in size. Larson operates Cascade with an obsessive level of secrecy, going to great lengths to cloak the firm’s transactions so that they can’t easily be traced back to the Gateses. In a 1999 interview with Fortune magazine, Larson said he chose the name “Cascade” because it was a generic-sounding name in the Pacific Northwest. Larson’s wealth-management strategy is grounded in value investing — a long-term approach to finding solid, underpriced stocks. This approach is often associated with Warren Buffett, who is a close friend of Gates. Larson focuses on buying and holding brick-and-mortar companies rather than high-growth technology stocks. (Gates chooses his tech investments and holds them outside Cascade.) The future of their philanthropy Gates and French Gates have played such an outsize role in philanthropy that questions about the future of the Gates Foundation immediately arose following news of the divorce. The foundation directs billions to 135 countries to help fight poverty and disease. As of 2019, it had given away nearly $US55 billion. (In 2006, Buffett pledged $US31 billion of his fortune to the Gates Foundation, greatly increasing its grant making.) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was created in 2000. Today, the two serve as its co-chairs, which the foundation has said will not change after the divorce is complete.CREDIT:BLOOMBERG Since he stepped down from day-to-day operations at Microsoft in 2008, Gates has devoted much of his time to the foundation. He also runs Gates Ventures, a firm that invests in companies working on climate change and other issues. Over the decades, Gates shed the image of a ruthless tech executive battling the US government on antitrust to be viewed as a global do-gooder. And he appears to be keenly aware of the stark contrast between the scale of his wealth and his role as a philanthropist. “I’ve been disproportionately rewarded for the work I’ve done — while many others who work just as hard struggle to get by,” he acknowledged in a year-end blog post from 2019. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was created in 2000. Today, the two serve as its co-chairs, which the foundation has said will not change after the divorce is complete. But French Gates has recently been more public about the efforts of her other group, Pivotal Ventures, which is focused on gender equality and social progress. It remains unclear what level of resources will be at her disposal when the divorce is complete, but French Gates will most likely still wield enormous influence in the world of philanthropy. “There’s no explanation how you get to be in this situation of privilege,” French Gates told The New York Times last year. “There’s just none.” The New York Times
Gates left Microsoft board amid probe into relationship: report Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce earlier this month after 27 years of marriage AFP AN HOUR AGO MAY 17, 2021 Bill Gates left the Microsoft board in 2020 as the board pursued an investigation into the billionaire's romantic relationship with a female employee, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. "Microsoft Corp. board members decided that Bill Gates needed to step down from its board in 2020 as they pursued an investigation into the billionaire's prior romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee that was deemed inappropriate," the Journal reported, citing people close to the matter. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/ne...t/news-story/bce0a2f2ca0aee62a070a1465c22141e
Gates hoped friendship with Epstein would help him win Peace Prize’ Sophia Ankel May 24, 2021 Key Points Bill Gates’ was friends with Jeffrey Epstein because he wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the DailyBeast reported. Mr Gates reportedly turned a blind eye to the convicted pedophile’s reputation as he pursued the Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize “is what Bill wants more than anything else in the world”, an ex-staffer said. Bill Gates turned a blind eye to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes conviction because he hoped the well-connected financier would help him secure the Nobel Peace Prize, a former employee of the Gates Foundation told the DailyBeast. The ex-staffer told the DailyBeast that the Foundation’s communication team was aware Mr Gates’ meetings with Epstein could have “reputational risks”, but they were told it “was a manoeuvre to try to get Gates a Nobel Peace Prize”. BiIll Gates reportedly kept some employees on call on prize day in case he was awarded the ultimate accolade. AP “Even back then, people knew this guy [Epstein] wasn’t squeaky clean,” the staffer, who was kept anonymous, told the DailyBeast. “He [Mr Gates] thought that Jeffrey would be able to help him, that he would know the right people or some kind of way to massage things, so he could get the Nobel Peace Prize,” they said. Mr Gates started meeting with Epstein in 2011, three years after the powerful financier was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Melinda Gates reportedly strongly objected to her husband’s meetings with the financier. According to the former employee, the Nobel Peace Prize “is what Bill wants more than anything else in the world”, The DailyBeast reported. In previous years, the Microsoft co-founder reportedly kept some employees on call on prize day in case he was awarded the ultimate accolade. “I think he was ultimately disappointed it didn’t work out,” the former staffer said. ....more..... https://www.afr.com/world/north-ame...ould-help-him-win-peace-prize-20210524-p57uh7