Bill Gates’ ex-wife Melinda Gates on her divorce with Microsoft founder: In the end, I had to go as …

Bill Gates divorced Melinda Ann French in 2021. Recently, Melinda French reflected on the end of her marriage. During an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the 60-year-old philanthropist explained that she had to end their 27-year-long marriage due to lack of ‘honesty’. During the interview, she said that to have a “trusted relationship, which is what I want in marriage”, “both partners have to be honest with one other”.
“And if you can’t, you can’t have intimacy and you can’t have trust. And so, in the end, I had to go,” she added.
Melinda was also on the show to promote her memoir, The Next Day. In the book, she opens up about "respond[ing] to the betrayals in my marriage without betraying myself in return," a strength which she says came from years of therapy. She also reveals that her separation from Bill Gates was kept private for over a year before it became public.
"You have to stay true to yourself always, right?” she told People, adding that it was one of the lessons she wanted to share with her new book.
“It was important for me to be real,” she noted. "Hopefully it might be helpful to someone else.”

During The Late Show interview, she also opened up about her current relationship. Although she did not give away any specifics, she said that she was currently in a "pretty great" relationship and is “very very happy”.
Melinda Gates is reportedly seeing entrepreneur Philip Vaughn. According to a PageSix report in 2024, the two were seen holding hands while getting off a helicopter ride in New York City. As per his LinkedIn profile, Vaughn is a founder and executive chairman of Tavour and has previously worked with Microsoft.