Bill Gates has a net worth above $100 billion and has given nearly $60 billion to the Gates Foundation, a record that led some people to ask whether there is such a thing as a “good billionaire.” In 2026 that image took a hit. According to The List, the release of a portion of the Epstein files by the US Department of Justice pulled him into a controversy serious enough that he apologised to his foundation’s staff.
What the Epstein files showed
In early 2026 the Justice Department released another round of files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Gates appeared in 2013 emails Epstein sent to himself, with notes on his decision to resign from the Gates Foundation and from Gates’ think tank, B3G. Epstein cited Gates’ extramarital affairs as one reason, and suggested a “severe marital dispute” with Melinda French Gates. His notes also insinuated that Gates had caught a sexually transmitted infection and sought drugs to hide it from his wife.
A Gates spokesperson first told PEOPLE the claims were “absolutely absurd and completely false.” Then The Wall Street Journal obtained a recording of Gates addressing foundation staff. He admitted associating with Epstein, including after the financier’s conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, but denied doing or seeing anything illicit. He also confirmed two affairs, “one with a Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events, and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities.”
The Journal had identified the bridge player in 2023. Epstein, it said, later paid for her to attend coding school. The physicist’s identity is unconfirmed. It may be a Microsoft engineer who said she had a relationship with Gates, which led the board to hire an outside law firm. A Gates spokesperson confirmed the work affair at the time but denied it caused him to leave the board.
Older complaints
Paul Allen’s 2011 memoir, “Idea Man,” portrayed Gates as a bully. Allen wrote that Gates insisted on a 64-36 split of Microsoft when he expected 50-50. After his Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, he said he overheard Gates and Steve Ballmer scheming to dilute his stake. Allen left in 1982, and Gates tried to buy his shares cheaply. Allen refused.
Others were smaller but telling. In 2013 Gates shook hands with South Korean President Park Geun-hye with one hand in his pocket, which Korean outlets called disrespectful. The National Assembly’s secretary general said it was “way too casual.”
The List also revisited a 2017 letter to the Gateses from the lawyer of a bike shop manager. It alleged sexual harassment by Michael Larson, Gates’ longtime money manager at Cascade Investment. The woman settled under a non-disclosure agreement. Melinda French Gates, it said, was critical of her husband’s dismissal of the case and sought an outside law firm’s review before Larson was reinstated.
Former Microsoft employee Dan Graves told Business Insider that in the summer of 1988 Gates rented a ski resort in the French Alps for staff, and that he found Gates lying on top of a woman on the lawn the next morning. The New York Times obtained a 2006 email in which Gates asked an employee to dinner and wrote, “If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened.” Sources told the Times he was not predatory.
The climate memo
Gates founded Breakthrough Energies in 2015. A decade later he posted a Gates Notes memo denouncing the “doomsday view of climate change” and arguing that climate change will not “lead to humanity’s demise.” He said resources should shift toward human welfare, while insisting the issue is serious. Climate sceptics seized on it. Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that he had “just won the War on the Climate Change Hoax” because Gates had supposedly admitted being “completely WRONG.” Scientists also questioned the memo.
