Bill Gates once made a pros-and-cons list about marriage on a whiteboard
Bill and Melinda Gates announced they were divorcing on Monday after 27 years
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Bill Gates was so serious about marriage, he once listed the pros and cons on a whiteboard.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder and Melinda Gates — who announced they were divorcing on Monday after 27 years — discussed the incident in the 2019 Netflix series "Inside Bill’s Brain."
Melinda, 56, laughed when she recalled walking in on Bill making the list, noting "He had to make a decision," about whether to tie the knot.
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"I took the idea of marriage very seriously," Bill explained in the documentary.
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| MSFT | MICROSOFT CORP. | 427.11 | +1.91 | +0.45% |
The two met in 1987, at a dinner in New York City, not long after Melinda had joined Microsoft as a product manager, according to CNBC.
After about a year of dating, the two were at a crossroads.
"You know, we cared a lot for each other and there were only two possibilities: either, we were going to break up or we were going to get married," Bill, 65, said in the series.
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He "wanted to be married, but he didn’t know whether he could actually commit to it and [run] Microsoft," Melinda added.
The pair eventually married in Hawaii in 1994. Two years later, Melinda left the tech company to focus on starting a family. She and Bill now have three children: Jennifer, 25, Rory, 21, and Phoebe, 19.
The couple launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, and built it into possibly the largest and most influential private philanthropic organization in the world.
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In the Netflix show, Bill said that he and Melinda were "truly equal partners."
"She’s a lot like me in that she is optimistic and she is interested in science. She is better with people than I am," he said.
The two will remain in their roles as co-chairs and trustees of the foundation, which said in a statement "no changes to their roles or the organization are planned."
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The Gateses, long recognized for their deep pockets, philanthropy and pledges to give away 95 percent of their fortune, are known for their work tackling social-justice and humanitarian issues and were never ones to publicly live extravagant lifestyles.
A divorce filing obtained by TMZ shows that Melinda asked for the divorce, citing that the marriage was "irretrievably broken."