Bill and Melinda Gates are divorcing, news that does not interest me at all. A pair of meddling incompetent billionaires are splitting their fortune? Whoop-te-doo, as we say down here in the holler, does that mean they’ll stop trying to interfere in healthcare and education? Probably not.
But what does make me sit up and listen is that Melinda is letting all her resentments hang out. Oh boy! I am not at all surprised that Bill was suckered by Jeffrey Epstein.
Melinda Gates met with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alongside her husband Bill in New York City and soon after said she was furious at the relationship between the two men, according to people familiar with the situation.
The previously unreported meeting occurred at Epstein’s Upper East Side Mansion in September 2013, on the same day the couple accepted the Lasker Bloomberg Public Service Award at the Pierre Hotel and were photographed alongside then-mayor Mike Bloomberg.
The meeting would prove a turning point for Gates’ relationship with Epstein, the people familiar with the matter say, as Melinda told friends after the encounter how uncomfortable she was in the company of the wealthy sex offender and how she wanted nothing to do with him.
This is what I don’t get about these people who willingly associated with Epstein. As the article says, Epstein was rude and arrogant and was constantly name-dropping, so why would anyone with billions of dollars want to hang out with him?
The ties between Gates and Epstein ran much deeper than the tech mogul first admitted. As The New York Times reported, starting in 2011, Gates met with Epstein on numerous occasions. This was three years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in Florida; by then, accusations that Epstein exploited girls and young women were widely reported in the press.
Oh, and this is fun: catch Gates lying about his relationship.
Indeed, the Times reported Gates visited Epstein multiple times from 2011 to 2013, and that Epstein had tried pitching a new charitable fund to JPMorgan honchos and to the Gates foundation. In 2013, Gates also took a ride on Epstein’s private jet (christened by tabloids as the Lolita Express), from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Florida, according to flight records reviewed by the Times. CNBC also reported that Gates rendezvoused with Epstein in New York in 2013.
When Gates first met Epstein, he was still Microsoft’s chairman and the second richest person in the world with a net worth of $56 billion.
“I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him,” Gates said in September 2019, as media coverage into his connections with Epstein were heating up. “I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that. There were people around him who were saying, ‘Hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people.’
Oh, yeah? What were you doing in Palm Beach, Florida in 2013 that you now want to hide, Bill?
Bill Gates had a perverted underage relationship with Clippy, so I hear.
Killed Clippy to cover it up, but everyone cheered. Me too.
I hope this puts a damper on the project to implant microchips in vaccines.
Never met him personally, but I’ve worked there off and on, including research, and people making presentations to him directly hated it. He came off as an entitled bully. Of course this is hearsay, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Isn’t “associating with Epstein” something someone would want to hide all by itself, regardless of whether anything else happened?
Gates is the modern Rockefeller: An utter monster of a man who is going to throw money around before he dies in an effort to buy his way out of whatever Hell he believes awaits him.
William George@5 I think the Gates Foundation can do some good whatever the motivation is. I doubt his goal is atonement. He is just very sure that he can solve the world’s problems. Well, it’s a better hobby than establishing an OS monopoly.
PaulBC @6. Exactly. Contrast that to Steve Jobs (for example). Trying to rape the world even from his deathbed and beyond. At least this one gave up the rape business ‘in the prime of his life’.
mastmaker@7 I loved Anthony Michael Hall’s portrayal of Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999). It’s kind of a cheesy TV movie that I had a lot of fun watching with friends at the time. But it has stuck with me as the real explanation for Bill Gates. He’s just this vulnerable guy and wants everyone to need him so he can feel important. Steve Jobs, by contrast, is a run-of-the-mill asshole. Worth the watch, I think, whether you buy the premise or not.
@6: The Gates Foundation can and does also do a lot of harm, generally by favoring technological solutions to social &/or ecological problems. For example – Mosquito nets: short-term, but good. Gene drives of GM mosquitoes: unnecessary (now that vaccine development is well under way) and potentially disastrous.
@7: Jobs and Gates – both assholes, both … well, to be polite, let’s just say they both developed technologies “inspired” by prior work. Jobs sold his brilliantly, Gates had a nice introduction to one of daddy’s friends at IBM. Jobs envisaged modern phones decades before they were feasible; Gates envisaged corporate control. Funnily enough, they both won – I have an iPhone and an iMac and am also compelled to rent some software for work that I would rather buy because in the long run that’s cheaper. For me.
The Gates foundation also refuses to consider any kind of ethical criteria in their investment side. As a result they end up doing things like paying for healthcare for people harmed by companies they are invested in.
@#1: Melinda Gates was the head of marketing for Microsoft Bob, the incredibly unsuccessful program… thing… which introduced the concept of “active assistants” including Clippy. So this divorce actually cuts the last vestige of Clippy out of Bill Gates’ life.
It’s astonishing that Gates apologists like the ones I’m seeing here still exist.
Gates has one of the biggest carbon footprints of anybody in the world. In 2017 alone, his private jet emitted about as much carbon dioxide (1629 tons) as 325 average human beings will create in their entire lives. His way-bigger-than-anybody-needs (24 bathrooms, valued at $145 million) house was built with a million logs from 500-year-old trees.
He is literally the reason there is not already a vaccine for Coronavirus that third-world countries can make and use — he is the one who convinced Oxford to sell their patent to AstraZeneca; they were originally going to make it free. If variants pop up which are bad enough to seriously jeopardize civilization — which is actually a possibility, given that the lack of access to patented vaccines has led to the current mess in India and Brazil (and the increasing mess in Africa) — it will in a vary literal and direct sense be his fault.
And that’s without even touching on the ills of the Gates Foundation or Microsoft, both of which are and always have been absolutely despicable.
Vicar, the: you write stuff, but by now I believe nothing you write.
(Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? That’s you)
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For the “tall poppy” haters, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
So is his footprint worse than Larry Ellison’s? A lot of people with less money than either build giant mansions and travel by private jet. $145 million not much more than 0.1% of his net worth. It seems a little odd to single him out. And yes, wealth inequality is a huge problem, but it’s not limited to Bill Gates by any means.
Interesting. I would have thought Elon Musk had a large carbon footprint, but I guess the rocket launches don’t count.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musks-carbon-footprint-looks-modest-by-billionaire-standards-but-then-he-doesnt-own-a-yacht-11613494353
@#13, John Morales:
Ask me if I care whether somebody who frequently takes over whole comments sections and inevitably ends up turning out to be wrong, yet carries on endlessly, believes what I say.
The problem with private philanthropy by the extremely wealthy is that it bends the “marketplace” of philanthropic spending to the personal agenda of the donor.
Anyone wealthy enough to set up an entity like the Bill and Melinda Fates Foundation should go out of their way to put their efforts into important welfare that is not being addressed adequately by existing sources: adult intellectual disability, for instance, or domestic violence. But the Gates specifically set up the foundation saying they would be tackling malaria vaccines — as if the answer was simply throwing more money at a problem that had been worked on for decades by many different research groups who had failed because of the nature of malaria’s innate immune-shifting tactics. It wasn’t really about public health, it was about Bill Gates targeting things that will look impressive in his obituary.
Vicar, singular @16, you obviously care enough to post a comment asking me to ask you whether you care. So, you do care.
This is connected indirectly through the link I posted in @15, but it has a very clear chart of carbon footprint by billionaires. The biggest contributor appears to be yacht ownership, so footprint doesn’t line up in order with wealth. In fact, land dwellings are a small contributor, if you believe this model. Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) makes the cut, though his net worth is “only” $19B. And Larry Ellison does have a larger footprint than Bill Gates, which I kind of suspected. Roman Abramovich leaves the competition in the dust, at more than twice the footprint of everyone but David Geffen. I never even heard of him. He has $14B and it’s all in the yacht.
Michael Bloomberg is the lowest offender here, despite having $55B, mostly “other transportation”, probably jet travel. I am relieved he didn’t make it far in the Democratic primaries, but he’s known for philanthropy and had already given a boatload of money to my grad school alma mater (and his) Johns Hopkins around the time I started there over 30 years ago.
Again, I don’t forgive anyone for their carbon footprint, but it doesn’t make much sense to single out Bill Gates. The problem is systemic. And superyachts are an abomination.
Note to self: David Geffen is not Gerry Goffin. Gotta keep that straight, though it would be a hoot if Carole King’s ex-husband and collaborator had written Pleasant Valley Sunday for the Monkees and then gone on to be a multi-mega-gazillionaire. Also, Ronald Perelman is not Ron Perlman, the actor who played Hellboy. I think that one disappoints me even more.
Collage dropout Bill Gates donated $9+M to the Discovery Institute. At that time Gates also listed Tony Perkins as an “advisor”. Perkins was also an “advisor” to our former Grifter in Chief, what a (non)shock.
https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-denies-supporting-intelligent-design
https://www.discovery.org/a/1537/
https://www.skepticality.com/assets/msg10979.html
“Collage” ==> “College”, although it may work either way since Gates has been a fan of cut and paste.
Coincidentally, I read this today. If even half of this stuff is true… it’s definitely believable.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/humanity-does-not-need-bill-gates