This week, billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates announced they are divorcing.
The Microsoft co-founder and his wife, who launched the world's largest charitable foundation, said they would continue to work together at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In identical tweets on Monday, the former couple said they had decided to end their marriage of 27 years.
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"We have raised three incredible children and built a foundation that works all over the world to enable all people to lead healthy, productive lives," they said in a statement.
"We ask for space and privacy for our family as we begin to navigate this new life."
For both Bill and Melinda, equality in their relationship was important.
"We certainly weren't working as equals when we started together. I was down several levels at Microsoft, and he was the CEO," Melinda recalled to Fortune.
"We've had to change to really be coequals. It's not something that immediately happens overnight, but we're both committed to it. We needed to talk behind the scenes when it wasn't working. But I think that's come now."
In 2019, she told CNBC that they had to work to ensure they weren't falling "back into our own sort of biases about who does what".
She gave an example of the conversations that took place when eldest daughter Jennifer was starting school.
They'd enrolled her in a school that meant a 45 minutes round-trip, but Melinda realised that would mean she'd waste a lot of time waiting in traffic, so she suggested a school closer to home, but Bill was convinced they'd found the perfect school.
"So Bill said, 'What could I do? What could I do to make it easier?' And I said, 'Well, you could drive,'" she explained. So he did, and they shared school drop-off duties.
"Three weeks in, I started to notice more dads were driving and showing up with their kids," Melinda recalled. "And a mum said to me, 'Do you see what’s going on here?' And I was like, 'Well, I don't know. More dads are dropping off.
"And she says, 'Yeah, we went home with our hands on hips and said, 'If Bill Gates can drive his kids to school, then by gosh, you can too!'"
Since news of their divorce broke, it has come to light that Bill holidays every year with his ex-girlfriend, Ann Winblad, a tradition that started when they began dating in 1984 after meeting at a computer conference.
The tradition to spend a long weekend together at a cottage in North Carolina continued after the pair broke up in 1987 and according to a 1997 Time profile, the holidays with Ann was part of the deal when he married Melinda.
“We can play putt-putt while discussing biotechnology,” Bill said of his weekend getaways with Ann, who is a software expert and venture capitalist from Seattle.
Ann added to Time, “We share our thoughts about the world and ourselves.
“And we marvel about how, as two young overachievers, we began a great adventure on the fringes of a little-known industry and it landed us at the centre of an amazing universe."
The pair are so close that Bill sought Ann's advice before proposing to Melinda.
“When I was off on my own thinking about marrying Melinda, I called Ann and asked for her approval,” he said.
Ann approved, recalling, “I said she’d be a good match for him because she had intellectual stamina.”
The Gates are among the world's most prolific philanthropists. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000, a merging of two previous Gates' foundations, the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation.
It is easily the most influential private foundation in the world, with an endowment worth close to AU$64 billion.
In 2008, Bill gave up much of his day-to-day work at Microsoft to focus on the foundation, alongside his wife.
Melinda said in their 2018 annual letter that when Bill first came to the foundation, he was used to being in charge.
"I'd stayed home with our kids, so I was restarting my career," she wrote.
"There were times I felt that disparity - in meetings when I was reticent and he was voluble, or when the person we were meeting with looked toward Bill and not me. It's always been important to us that we are equal partners in our foundation's work. We've learned over time to give each other feedback at home about times in the office when we didn't meet that goal. And we're better for it."
Bill agreed: "Our occasional disagreements these days are over tactics. Because I've been a public figure longer, and because I'm a man, some people assume I am making the big decisions. That's never been the case.
"Some people see Melinda as the heart of our foundation, the emotional core. But just as she knows I'm more emotional than people realise, I know she's more analytical than people realise. When I get really enthusiastic about something, I count on her to make sure I'm being realistic... We are partners in both senses that people use the word these days: at home and at work."
The couple said in the statement announcing their divorce they would continue to co-run the foundation, which works on global health and development issues like eradicating polio, improving sanitation systems in impoverished countries and developing clean, affordable energy.
In 2020, the Gates Foundation established the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to hasten the development and evaluation of drugs for patients with COVID-19.
The foundation pledged US$250 million to the World Health Organisation at the beginning of the pandemic.
The Gates' separation comes two years after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and ex-wife Mackenzie announced their divorce, but the Gates' wealth could be much more complex to carve up.
Most of Bezos' wealth was concentrated in Amazon stock, but Microsoft stock makes up less than 20 per cent of Bill's assets. Instead, he's shifted most of his wealth into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Last year, Bill, formerly the world's richest person thanks to co-founding Microsoft in 1975, said he was stepping down from the company's board to focus on philanthropy.
He was Microsoft's CEO until 2000 and since then has gradually scaled back his involvement in the company he started with Paul Allen in 1975.
He transitioned out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft in 2008 and served as chairman of the board until 2014.
-With AAP.
Feature image: Getty.
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