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04 May 2021 "We continue to share the faith of the mission and we will continue
our work together with the Foundation
, but we no longer believe we can grow as a couple in the next phase of our lives", yes in the statement, identical by the Gates, Bill and Melinda, announcing their divorce. And despite the 65-year-old Microsoft co-founder, he boasts a fortune of $ 130.5 billion (fourth in the Forbes ranking of the richest in the world, but for many years the primacy was his), the real question many are concerned with the future of
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill & Melinda Gates is, to all intents and purposes, a multinational company with approximately 1,600 employees and offices on multiple continents.
Since 2008, Bill Gates has relinquished his operational positions at Microsoft to work full time with his wife at the Gates Foundation. In 2014 he also resigned from the essentially honorary position of chairman of Microsoft. According to estimates for the end of 2019, the Foundation has distributed grants totaling $ 55 billion for global health programs and education in the United States.
The Bill & Melinda Foundation now has an
endowment of approximately $ 50 billion
. According to the New York Times, "over the years it has had a huge influence in areas such as global health and basic education and has made great progress in reducing the death toll from malaria and other infectious diseases." The American newspaper added: "Over the past year the couple have been particularly prominent, with comments on the global fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, while the Foundation spent over a billion dollars on this goal."
The Foundation page indicates, as of December 31, 2019, direct funding of
5.1 billion dollars
assigned to 37 strategic programs. The news of the divorce, even if relevant from a personal point of view, is not comparable to the possible repercussions on the Foundation, which only in the last year has become a point of reference in
the global fight against Covid
, with a total investment of
1.75 billion dollars
. The funds were earmarked for vaccine research, testing and treatment programs and programs to help health systems in poorer countries cope with the pandemic.
The commitment, however, is not limited to funding: Bill Gates in recent months has been one of the most passionate supporters of the need to
follow science to fight the pandemic
. A commitment that has already emerged in research and funding on infectious diseases. In a 2015 Ted Talk, Gates warned of the potential risks of developing a global pandemic. An event that made him one of the
main targets of the conspiracy and denial theses, rebounded in the disinformation on social media that described the engineer as the hidden director of the '
pandemic for profit objectives
' and for the global control of the population.
The vision of the ex-wife could have some different nuances: the news has come that Melinda Gates, in a Financial Times interview recorded before the divorce announcement, states that rich nations don't need to vaccinate teens against Covid 19 but they must first
donating vaccines to poor countries
.
Recently, the Foundation has played an important role in the launch of
Covax
, a mechanism for the distribution of anti-Covid vaccines also for the benefit of the most disadvantaged countries. In the same period, however, it was criticized for the line in support of intellectual property rights even with respect to essential drugs.
Melinda Gates (who on Twitter after the announcement of the divorce added her maiden name to her profile, becoming Melinda French Gates), played a fundamental role in the foundation and the first development of the Foundation: it was she, when her husband he was still busy full-time with Microsoft, traveling the world to verify the main needs on the ground and then setting the charity's agenda. In 2006 she was invited to the
White House
to talk about the
fight against malaria
and in 2010 she spoke at the
UN General Assembly
on the fight against
AIDS
and
poverty
.
In their public appearances, Bill and Melinda rarely talked about their relationship. Melinda made a brief mention of a difficult moment in "The Moment of Lift", a book written in 2019
to explain "how empowering women changes the world". Since 2007 it was Bill Gates who
wrote the Foundation's annual letter
, Melinda says in the book, explaining that in 2012 she proposed to make her voice heard by writing the letter, a proposal that met with resistance from her husband.
In the end they decided to write it together, but there was a strong fight: "I thought we would kill each other, I thought 'this will end our marriage", wrote Melinda, explaining that since then the couple had started writing the letter together. annual programmatic. According to US press reports, it was she who ultimately filed for divorce after 27 years of marriage.
The financial implications of the end of the marriage on other initiatives are not yet known: Bill Gates holds 1.37% of Microsoft's free float, worth more than
$ 26 billion
, according to data from FactSet. Together with Warren Buffett, the couple created the
Giving Pledge
program
, which required participants to donate more than half of their wealth.