Bill Gates has been prominent during the COVID panic.  He has all sorts of ideas about controlling people's lives and "solving" climate change.  However, now that his wife is leaving him, the floodgates are opening.  The Bill Gates we're seeing isn't the amiable, slightly weird genius.  Instead, he's "sexual predator adjacent" — a man who befriended Jeffrey Epstein and had a questionable relationship with the Clinton Foundation.

For many people, Bill Gates was the genius behind the Microsoft empire.  For others, he was a mediocre programmer who had a nose for spotting other people's talent and, like a mob boss, pressuring them into handing their valuable products over to him.

Bill Gates was also the billionaire reportedly with disgusting personal habits.  I'm old enough to remember the stories about how filthy he was, complete with the slimy green teeth of a man who'd never met a toothbrush.

What saved Gates's reputation as a decent human being (with good personal hygiene) was his decision to marry Melinda French Gates, who used to be a general manager at Microsoft.  Thanks to no special skill of her own other than cleaning up and marrying Bill, she is one of the most powerful people in the world.  Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she dispenses the type of money that makes everyone want to do as she asks.

I've already covered the fact that it appears that news about Bill's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a pedophile on a grand scale, might have been what led Melinda to file for divorce.  Another straw might have been Bill's endless escapades with women throughout their marriage.  Like many rich and powerful men, Bill apparently wanted into women's underpants, and most women were happy to oblige.  (One must wonder if Epstein also offered him access to undies...)

The New York Times, after mostly ignoring Bill's peccadilloes for decades, now concedes that he didn't take his marriage vows seriously:

By the time Melinda French Gates decided to end her 27-year marriage, her husband was known globally as a software pioneer, a billionaire and a leading philanthropist.

But in some circles, Bill Gates had also developed a reputation for questionable conduct in work-related settings. That is attracting new scrutiny amid the breakup of one of the world's richest, most powerful couples.

[snip]

On at least a few occasions, Mr. Gates pursued women who worked for him at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, according to people with direct knowledge of his overtures.

In 2019, Microsoft's board of directors, on which Mr. Gates sat, opened an investigation into one of those cases after being notified that he had "sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000," Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, said on Sunday. The board hired a law firm to investigate. The following year, Mr. Gates stepped down from Microsoft's board. 

Then there's Bill's longstanding relationship with the Clinton Foundation.  This is disturbing news if you believe, as I do, that the Clinton Foundation is a fraudulent, pay-for-play enterprise.  It's a shame that Trump's DOJ didn't investigate it, but there's enough evidence to show that the Clintons skimmed money from the Foundation.  They certainly didn't pass much of it on to the Haitians.  But you already knew all that.

What you may not have know is that, whether through direct contributions or indirect contributions via other charities, Bill Gates was the single largest contributor to the Clinton Foundation.  Maybe it was completely innocent.  But still, we're left with a nexus of sleazy, awful people: Bill (Clinton) and Hillary and Bill (Gates) and Jeffrey, all of them revolving around grift, graft, and sleazy sex.

There's no getting away from a point I've often made to my children: when people have too much money and power, and these attributes are not offset by a God-centered morality, they're likely to feel that the ordinary rules that constrain our worst instincts no longer apply to them.  Bill was smart to have entered into a generous settlement with Melinda because I bet she has tales to tell.

Image: Bill and Melinda Gates (and is it me, or is that a deeply unhappy-looking woman — not situationally sad, but unhappy?).  YouTube screen grab.

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