Melinda French Gates and the tech ex-wives going it alone

As Melinda Gates opens up about her divorce, Tara Smith and Guy Kelly look at the Silicon Valley exes with billions to burn

As clubs go, it’s fairly niche: a handful of members, no official charter, and entry requirements that include having many hundreds of millions (ideally billions) in the bank and a very particular kind of ex-husband. Otherwise, anyone can join.

Welcome to the First Wives of the Silicon Valley Billionaires Club. Anybody questioning how good it can feel to join ought to look at the liberated glow of Melinda French Gates when she spoke to CBS anchor Gayle King this week. A “journey of healing” has apparently made her a new woman.

Her 27-year marriage to Bill Gates was once viewed as one of the strongest in the public eye, until their split last year. “You’re grieving a loss of something you thought you had and thought you had for your lifetime,” French Gates said.

She admitted that at least one affair, plus Bill’s friendship with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, had shaken the foundations of their union irreparably. “I certainly believe in forgiveness, so I thought we had worked through some of that. There just came a point in time where there was enough there that I realised it just wasn’t healthy and I couldn’t trust what we had.”

Since the divorce, Melinda, who met Bill in 1987 when she started working as a product manager at Microsoft, the company Gates had co-founded 12 years earlier, is worth around $6.2 billion. And so she joins the club, along with the first wives of Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sergey Brin, who have all found themselves single in middle-age with billions to work out what to do with.

Getting so rich so suddenly must take the sting out of becoming the clichéd ex-wife of a nerdish tech bro. But what makes the First Wives most interesting is what they do with that cash. In almost all cases, they’ve decided to give it away.

“I’m sure they’re doing it for the right reasons, but there’s some interesting messaging here,” says one Silicon Valley expert. “The tech billionaires are seen as super-baddies who hoard their wealth.

For these ex-wives, who have often been cheated on, using philanthropy is an interesting way of sending a message. Giving away the money they won in their divorces could almost be said to be a form of revenge.”

In Bill and Melinda’s case, they clearly bonded over philanthropy: from 1994 to 2018, the couple gave their foundation more than $36 billion. But one thing Melinda has in common with the sisters in her club is that she’s endured a lifetime of simply being seen as “the spouse” behind a great genius, and once they’ve broken free, it’s little surprise that they feel a shared desire to help lift up other women.

Tahmima Anam, author of the novel The Startup Wife, says: “These start-up men are often held up as male visionaries by other people, but the wife has to deal with the image and the real person, which is the worst set-up for equality in a marriage. It is not surprising that when they exit their marriages, they want to do something interesting for themselves.”

In 2000, when Justine Wilson married Elon Musk, then a “struggling twenty-something entrepreneur”, she had no idea she’d later become a multi-millionaire thanks to the success of his first company PayPal.

They divorced in 2008, after six children, and she has since called herself a “starter wife”. Wilson wrote an article in 2020 in which she gave a rare insight into what it is like for women who are often bright university graduates with ambitions of their own, but forgo all that to support their “brilliant” husbands.”We were breathing rarified air.

“We went to black-tie fundraisers and got the best tables at elite Hollywood nightclubs with Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio partying next to us,” she recalled. “‘When we travelled, we drove into the airfield up to Elon’s private jet where a flight attendant handed us champagne.”

“But the whirlwind of glitter couldn’t disguise a growing void at the core I barely recognised myself. I had turned into a trophy wife – and I sucked at it. I could no longer hide my boredom when the men talked and the women smiled and listened. I wasn’t interested in Botox and no matter how many highlights I got Elon pushed me to be blonder. ‘Go platinum,’ he kept saying, and I kept refusing.”

One of the first things she did when they agreed to divorce was dye her hair brunette. Six weeks later Musk was engaged to blonde British actress Talulah Riley, who he married in 2010, divorced in 2012, remarried in 2013 and re-divorced in 2014. Other members of the club have made even more dramatic statements.

Bezos was famously one of the few billionaires not to sign up to Bill Gates’s pledge to give a larger percentage of his money to good causes. By contrast, one of the first things his ex-wife MacKenzie Scott did after their divorce came through in 2019, following the revelation of his affair with businesswoman Lauren Sanchez, was to very quickly and very publicly donate record-breaking billions to charity.

Scott, who always shied away from the red carpet, walked away with $US38 billion in the divorce settlement and has already donated an incredible tenth of it to hundreds of worthy causes, many of them supporting women. It has been reported that she cannot give it away fast enough, given how Amazon accumulates value.

And while their husbands are often bitter rivals, racing to send their rockets to space, the First Wives support one another. Scott and French Gates teamed up together in July last year to donate $US40 million to an initiative called the Equality Can’t Wait Challenge, the aim of which is to “advance the power and influence of American women”.

French Gates’s charity page says: “We believe the world will be better for everyone when women, especially women of colour, are in position to make decisions, control resources and shape policies and perspectives in their homes.”

These particular women are definitely in control, finally. But it’s not all philanthropy and earnest statements of intent, nor is it a prerequisite of the club to swear off men for life. In her interview last week, French Gates said she is “dipping [her] toe in” the world of dating, and Scott, a successful novelist, has remarried a science teacher from her children’s school.

Of course, French Gates could go it alone, like Anne Wojcicki, who was a tech entrepreneur in her own right when she met and married Google co-founder Brin in 2007. In 2015, after eight years of marriage and two children, they divorced when Brin was discovered to be having an affair with a co-worker.

It was never disclosed how much Wojcicki won, but Brin is said to be worth $US30 billion. And besides, by the time they split, she had made her own billions. She’s since had a third child on her own and invests in digital start-ups led specifically by women. Once, she recalled how attendees at Davos are given colour-coded name tags in order of importance – with wives squarely at the bottom.”People would just look at your badge and be like, ‘Oh, you’re a partner.’ And then they ignore you,” she said.

In the First Wives of the Silicon Valley Billionaires Club, nobody can ignore you now.