https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-separate-worlds-of-bill-and-melinda-gates/
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I can’t even imagine having a 66,000 square ft house. They could both live there indefinitely and never even run into each other.
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@Nrdsb4, nah, she’d know he was there, she’d hear that pencil tapping or whatever annoying habits he has 
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Yeah, bit hard to feel sorry for them “stuck” at home.
WSJ has a story today (of course behind a paywall) that Melinda Gates talked to divorce attorneys in 2019. And that she was concerned about his association with Jeffery Epstein.
But I think this past year, with the stay at home orders and frankly a year of hardship, was very difficult for those with marriages that struggled before. And being stuck at home, even if it’s a very large home, can bring out all the warts that were already here.
I think marriage either got better and closer. Or worse. I think that there will be more couples that are splitting up. It was a really tough year. And couples could be confronted with the fact that they aren’t compatible anymore
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I do agree that the pandemic lock down either brought out the best or the worst in us.
Sometimes the other person’s breathing was annoying.
I still remember a friend of mine said there were times when she wanted to run a vacuum cleaner over her husband’s face. I told her that she shouldn’t tell me things like that in case I was called as a witness.
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MSN news had a reprint of that story (available through that annoying Edge newscrap), so I peeked. Not much what we did not know about and no bombshells… IMO, you are right - people who were unhappy about being together became more unhappy. It appears she got tired of playing a second fiddle and wanted more freedom to focus on the issues near and dear to her heart, like women’s health etc. - the things that were likely not at the top of Bill’s list.
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In a community property state, any income and any real or personal property acquired by either spouse during a marriage are considered community property and thus belong to both partners of the marriage. Any property that either partner had before they were married will not be divided upon divorce.
The main source of Bill Gates’ wealth is not his salary during the years they were married, but his ownership stake in Microsoft which he had before they were married. And that’s why she will get way less than 50%.
Who knows how much of his assets he co-mingled, though.
Melinda will end up with a vast fortune, no matter the percentage. It will be more money than she could spend in her lifetime. She will likely continue to give a lot of it away.
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My guess is, that’s going to be it. Melinda will have to figure out a way to live on $2 billion. Shouldn’t be too hard. 
Don’t forget that the couple pledged to give away a huge portion of their fortunes, so we are not talking about dividing the full $130B or whatever in half.
The local papers reported that the two did not have a prenup, just the separation agreement mentioned in the filing for divorce.
But the work he did for Microsoft during the years they were married increased the value of those shares enormously. So it’s not at all clear to me that their full value would go to him.
If I inherit an apartment block from a parent and spend most of my married life working to renovate and improve it, wouldn’t my spouse have a claim to part of the value?
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This article parallels so much of my family members who are splitting up after decades of marriage.
They just grew apart. The sentence “Bill could have treated Melinda better” really struck a nerve. It was as if they stopped being nice to each other and resentment grew. They were so intent on “winning” that they forgot about growing together and most importantly compromising.
I think that all of us can learn something from a long term couple divorcing. How to not let our self interests from being a team.
That’s my opinion lol!
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In the NY Post today - Bill told his golf buddies his relationship with Melinda was “loveless”
Yuck. NY Post is such a rag. Yuck.
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I’d love to be wrong, but coincidentally she wanted to divorce Bill over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Was Bill with a teenage girl(s)?
Given that there’s no reason to think you are right, let’s go ahead and assume you are wrong.
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I have been thinking more about this. I think from what I have been reading that when Melinda was writing her book she might have taken a harder look at her life and it came up short. The timing lines up, supposedly she started this process at the same time as the book.
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Or we can make the leap that the marriage was never that great… the number of years doesn’t mean much. You don’t know what someone’s marriage is really like. Maybe they stayed for the kids. Maybe it was a business–and time to split up the corporation (or retire as CEO or VP). Who knows?
Or maybe everything was too easy–no reason to build a team when one person acts like the team? Money doesn’t and can’t buy everything. But it can sure cover a ton of problems.
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For those who were wondering why it took so long for the Gateses to file even though they were rumored to have started the process in 2019… drafting that separation agreement was not an easy task because of the complexity of the assets involved (unlike in Bezos’s case where the majority of $$ was simply in Amazon stock).
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-gateses-public-split-spotlights-a-secretive-fortune/
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