Melinda French Gates is finally telling us why she CTRL+ALT+DELETED her 27-year marriage to tech tycoon and sweater connoisseur, Bill Gates.
ICYMI, Melinda (queen, philanthropist, now single and thriving at 60) and Bill (former richest man alive, 69, big into mosquitoes and Microsoft) were married for nearly three decades before they split in 2021. That’s longer than most iPhones last and nearly as long as it takes for your grandma to understand how to use Zoom.
The couple has three kids: Jennifer (28, horse girl, mom of two), Rory (25, the elusive middle child), and Phoebe (22, TikTok potential pending). Oh, and Melinda is now officially a grandma to baby girl Leila (2) and the tiny human Mia (5 months), who already has more drama in her family tree than a Netflix docuseries.
So what actually happened behind the billionaire mansion walls? Melinda dropped the truth bomb while chatting with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show — because if you’re going to air out your emotional laundry, it may as well be on national television with a man who rocks glasses like no one else.
She said, “I learned, to have a trusted relationship, which is what I wanted in marriage, both partners have to be honest with one another. And if you can’t, you can’t have intimacy and you can’t have trust.”
Translation: Someone wasn’t exactly playing by the Relationship Terms & Conditions. Melinda didn’t name names, but that statement had the “I found some shady emails and emotionally packed PowerPoint presentations” energy.
“And so in the end, I had to go,” she told Stephen, channeling every woman who’s ever left a man who thought “emotional vulnerability” was a coding language.
Melinda walked away not because of money or fame or because she was tired of watching Bill organize his books by binary code — but because trust was missing. And let’s be real, you can’t download that.
Someone give Melinda a crown and a Netflix deal, because this queen just upgraded her OS to Melinda 2.0: Now with More Boundaries and Better Vibes.