Bill Gates’s Carefully Curated Geek Image Unravels in Two Weeks

Before all the revelations about his divorce, dubious workplace behavior and ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates was just America’s huggable billionaire techno-philanthropist. Sure, he had accumulated absurd riches from cofounding Microsoft Corp. and lived in a $130 million mansion with an indoor trampoline room. But he was also known to drive his kids to school, binge Modern Family, dress like Ned Flanders and wait in line for his favorite cheeseburgers.

There was power in Gates’s air of down-to-earth dad-dorkdom. Lots of one-percenters donate big to vital causes; few achieve Reddit AMA relatability. Over the past two decades, Gates trampolined off his and his wife Melinda’s vast charitable efforts to another stratosphere of societal influence. He became arguably the leading business voice on fixing the world’s woes, as comfy pontificating about eradicating disease and improving education systems on the Ellen DeGeneres Show as he was advocating for climate change and Covid-19 solutions on Fox News.