When Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Melinda French Gates announced the Giving Pledge in June 2010, publicly committing to giving at least half their wealth back to society during their lifetimes or in their wills and urging other billionaires to do the same, Jeffrey Epstein saw a way to make money. Two years earlier, the registered sex offender had pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution, including from an underage girl, following his 2006 arrest. After serving a light, work-release sentence in a Florida jail, he resumed what he had done for more than a decade: cultivating a network of scientists, musicians, bankers, Nobel laureates, politicians, billionaire businessmen, academics, filmmakers—just about anyone with influence who could give him a sheen of legitimacy by association, a valuable introduction, a piece of information he could keep in his back pocket to be wielded in exchange for a favor. Tucked in between haircut appointments at the upscale Frédéric Fekkai salon and massage appointments were endless meetings, video calls, private jet trips, dinners, and cocktails.
An egregious name-dropper, Epstein was fully aware that the more names he dangled and the more connected he was to people, the more accepted he would be in those rarefied circles, where the best vetting mechanism was a friend-of-a-friend introduction. Out of his multiple residences, including in New York and Palm Beach and on Little St. James, his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Epstein conducted his business and was welcomed by those he courted, his sordid background reduced to a footnote.
The Giving Pledge had created an enormous splash. The star power of two of the richest and weightiest billionaires made the effort hard to ignore. Buffett’s commitment to give the bulk of his fortune away during his lifetime to the Gates Foundation, through which Gates and French Gates were tackling some of humanity’s most intractable problems, gave them the moral authority to ask other billionaires to step up. By August 2010, 40 billionaires and billionaire couples had signed the pledge. By year’s end, 17 more had joined the group. At the same time, some who had taken the pledge began to wonder: How to disburse that money? Many billionaires had private foundations, but they often were modest, family affairs. Building a foundation to hand out big sums of money is a significant undertaking akin to launching a new business. Some billionaires thus turned to Gates, the one person who already had a massive operation going, wondering if they could partner up with his foundation in some way, or have it direct their money. Connected as he was to scientists, billionaires, and Gates’s trusted lieutenants, Epstein heard about the unanticipated outcome of the pledge for the foundation and began to tunnel a way into the philanthropist’s orbit.
In 1992, he had met a young woman named Melanie Walker after he walked up to her at New York’s Plaza Hotel and suggested that she could be a model. Walker demurred but they kept in touch. By 2010, she was a neurological surgeon married to Steven Sinofsky, a senior Microsoft executive and ally of Gates, and was working at the Gates Foundation. Boris Nikolic, the former chief advisor on science and technology to Gates, and Nathan Myhrvold, the scientist and one of Gates’s closest advisors, had also known Epstein. Myhrvold knew Epstein because the two often ran into each other at TED conferences, and because Epstein donated to scientific research. Assured by the connections that some of his trusted allies had to Epstein, Gates decided to meet with the disgraced financier, despite the consternation of some foundation employees. One evening in January 2011, not long after a blizzard had menaced the city of New York, Epstein hosted a dinner at his Upper East Side townhouse for Gates, pitching the evening to some invitees as a relaxed gathering with a group of influential people. It was the kind of gathering Epstein excelled at—entertaining and stimulating, a setting where social chatter mixed seamlessly with business talk. Gates appeared to find it an enjoyable evening. That May, Epstein hosted another meeting for the philanthropist. Among the guests were Larry Summers, the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and president emeritus of Harvard University; James E. Staley, a former senior executive of JPMorgan Chase; and Nikolic. At some point in the evening, the five men posed for a picture, which would later accompany a 2019 New York Times article. Epstein used the opportunity to present an idea to Gates, and even included slides: Could some of the billionaire philanthropic dollars being pledged be pooled into a charitable fund created for the Gates Foundation? Such donor-advised funds are vehicles created by banks and other big asset managers into which wealthy individuals can deposit money that they eventually plan to give to charity. Donors get to decide the causes they want to direct their philanthropic funds to, but until they do, the money managers oversee the funds for a fee.
Gates was receptive to the idea, emboldening Epstein to begin pushing his proposal more steadily. He roped in JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank where he was a client, to set up a donor-advised fund for the Gates Foundation, which would “enhance the current giving” by the outfit. Bank executives were already in touch with foundation staffers about a separate project, which led to the creation of a healthcare fund in 2013. Epstein had long been friends with Staley, who goes by Jes, at the time a top lieutenant of JPMorgan’s chief executive Jamie Dimon. Over hundreds of emails studded with typographical errors sent to JPMorgan executives including Mary Callahan Erdoes, who led the bank’s private wealth and asset management business, Epstein laid out his ambitions for the donor-advised fund. It would be a “very high profile” club with an entry donation of $100 million. Like other donor-advised funds, this one too would provide donors the tax benefits up front. The proposed structure would involve silos—areas that the Gates Foundation focused on, such as polio, maternal health, vaccines, and agriculture—that donors wanted to direct their money into. Membership to this donor club would be known, but donors could choose to remain anonymous about how they directed their money. This was because, Epstein wrote to Erdoes and Staley, many potential donors who had spoken to Gates about giving money did not want to do so publicly. JPMorgan would run the donor-advised fund. Epstein suggested that the bank collect all the audit, investment management, trustee, and related fees from the fund and act as its fiduciary; he would take a cut of those fees amounting to millions of dollars. If done right, he promised the JPMorgan bankers, the fund would grow from billions of dollars to tens of billions of dollars by its fourth year of operation. Nikolic, the Gates advisor, was copied on some of the email exchanges between Epstein, Erdoes, and Staley.
“In essence this DAF will allow Bill to have access to higher quality people, investment, allocation, governance without upsetting either his marriage or the sensitvites of the current foundation employees,” Epstein wrote, in one of the badly punctuated and typo-riddled emails. He repeatedly warned the bankers not to engage with too many “low level” foundation employees, who he claimed were confused and without direction. The emails don’t explain why the donor-advised fund would upset Gates’s marriage. The fund would be marketed to billionaires as a hassle-free way to engage in philanthropy. When Erdoes asked if the foundation could be convinced to actively participate in marketing the fund to potential donors, Epstein replied that it would be easy as long as the foundation were given “emotional credit” where it was due. “They are a very very sensitve bunch that has spent billions,, seperate from polio. there is little that can be held up as a great success and even polio is not yet finished,” Epstein continued, unburdened by the rules of spelling, grammar, and punctuation. At the time, the Gates Foundation was in the midst of a high-publicity campaign around polio eradication. It had become a personal mission for Gates; the foundation had already directed hundreds of millions to the effort, and he expected that other billionaires too would see the urgency. Gates was “terribly frustrated,” Epstein wrote, and would like to focus on the foundation’s successes rather than on the failures. Thus, he added, it was necessary to showcase in the proposal materials that a donor-advised fund would bring additional money for vaccines by highlighting efforts that had worked.
As of October 2011, Erdoes and Epstein were still going back and forth on the terms, with Epstein getting increasingly frustrated about the slow pace of the deal and pushing the bankers to finish the proposal. He insisted that the proposal be tailored only to Gates, and that it be negotiated directly between Staley and the billionaire to avoid internal politicking at the foundation. By January 2012 they were still trying to get the project off the ground, and the effort eventually sputtered. “The incentives were misaligned,” said a person involved in the discussions. “JPMorgan was looking to run the fund, Bill wanted the money [for vaccines], and Epstein wanted the connections.” It died down, this person added, “because there was no money, there were no pots of money looking for a place to go. Once it became clear that there was nothing to what he was offering, the conversations stopped.”
Epstein appeared to be in contact with Gates in early 2014. A January 12 entry in Epstein’s schedule mentions him ordering sweatshirts for Gates and four others, including “Boris and Joi” (presumably Boris Nikolic and Joichi Ito, then the director of the MIT Media Lab, a research unit of the university to which Gates had donated). Epstein was also supposed to participate in a Skype call with Gates on January 28 arranged by Larry Cohen, the billionaire’s longtime right-hand man and chief executive of Gates Ventures. On September 8, 2014, Epstein arranged a day of meetings between Gates and other billionaires. By the end of that year, Gates had stopped talking to him, Epstein told an associate.
Perhaps none of this would have spilled out into public view had Epstein not been found dead at 6:30 A.M. on August 10, 2019, of an apparent suicide in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a squat, Brutalist structure the color of cardboard in lower Manhattan. Just one month earlier, he had been arrested in New York on federal sex trafficking charges, after the Miami Herald published a series of stories questioning the lenient plea deal Epstein had struck in 2008 when Alexander Acosta, who was serving as former president Trump’s labor secretary, had been the U.S. attorney in Miami. (Acosta stepped down from his cabinet post less than a week after Epstein’s July 2019 arrest.) Reporters, sensing the beginnings of a hot story, began digging. Over the next two years, they would unearth the deep network Epstein had built of high-profile and influential men. What could have drawn so many luminaries into the realm of a convicted sex offender? As the skeletons kept tumbling out, they ravaged the reputations of powerful men. One of the first to go was the billionaire Leslie Wexner, then the chief executive of L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, and one of Epstein’s oldest connections who had given to Epstein as a gift the Manhattan townhouse he lived in. Britain’s Prince Andrew, whose friendship with Epstein had been tabloid fodder for decades, was stripped of his royal privileges. The billionaire private equity investor Leon Black was so backed into a corner after it emerged that he had paid $158 million in fees to Epstein for tax advice that he retired from Apollo Global Management, the firm he had cofounded in 1990. Black, a serious art collector, with a collection that some have estimated is worth $1 billion, was also forced to step down as the chairman of the Museum of Modern Art and retreat from New York’s charity and social circuit due to his association with Epstein. In 2023, four years after his ties to Epstein were revealed, Black continued to fight allegations of rape from women who had also been involved with Epstein. Staley, the JPMorgan banker who had become the chief executive of Barclays, lost millions of dollars in bonuses, and eventually his job at the British bank. His long-standing ties to Epstein and alleged participation in some of his activities, and JPMorgan’s financial involvement with the sexual predator, would eventually result in multiple lawsuits.
Lawyers for Prince Andrew, who has denied any wrongdoing, have said the royal regrets his association with Epstein. Black has said he did not know of or participate in the sexual activities of Epstein. Staley, who once described his friendship with Epstein as “profound,” has repeatedly said he knew little about the allegations against his friend and denied any wrongdoing. Wexner has said he knew nothing of Epstein’s activities, and he cut off ties with Epstein in 2007. This symphony of innocence, ignorance, and regret has only highlighted the fact that some of the world’s smartest, savviest, and wealthiest men appear to have had the exact same failure of judgment about the exact same man, who is no longer around to present his side.
And then there was Gates. Nikolic, who is widely reported to have introduced Gates to Epstein, told this reporter that he had not done so. He added that he met Epstein in 2009 through Walker, whom the disgraced financier had once appointed his science advisor. “I remember this day—and I greatly regret that day,” Nikolic said. Walker had a different recollection of events from Nikolic, according to someone briefed on her version of events. In September 2019, a month after Epstein died, The New Yorker magazine published an article by Ronan Farrow detailing the close fund-raising relationship that the MIT Media Lab had shared with Epstein. A research unit within the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Media Lab studies the intersection of art, science, design, and media. Farrow reported that Ito, the lab’s director, accepted gifts from Epstein even though he was listed as a “disqualified” donor in the university’s database, and went to great lengths to conceal Epstein’s identity. After some MIT staffers said they were uncomfortable with Epstein’s visits because he brought along “assistants” who were in their twenties, Ito began to meet Epstein off campus.1 John Tye, a lawyer and the founder of Whistleblower Aid, who helped former MIT coordinator Signe Swenson go public with her allegations against Epstein and MIT Media Lab, told Farrow that this was a way for Epstein to launder his reputation through philanthropy. Additionally, Farrow reported, Epstein also “directed” gifts from others, including Gates, who had made a $2 million donation to the lab. Within the university, the gift was only listed as a contribution from Gates at the request of a friend. It was not included in any public material because Gates wished to remain anonymous to the outside world. Not long after, The New York Times reported that Gates had met Epstein mulitple times between 2011 and 2014, following up on a CNBC report from August 2019 that said the two men had met to discuss ways to “increase philanthropic funding.”2 The stories noted that the interactions between the two men had started three years after Epstein had been convicted of sex crimes and served time in jail.
The news reports in 2019 triggered an MIT inquiry into whether its professors had engaged in misconduct, and its executive committee hired two law firms to investigate the university’s ties with Epstein. Board members were especially worried that their association with Epstein via MIT could tarnish their professional image, so the review was largely limited to screening for the university’s exposure. Gates refused to be interviewed for the investigation, but his counsel said the philanthropist often donated anonymously and the $2 million donation to MIT had nothing to do with Epstein.3 The gift came not from his foundation, but from Gates Ventures. Although the donation may or may not have been at Epstein’s recommendation, Ito used it to seek other donations, telling potential donors that if Gates was donating at Epstein’s behest, it was legitimate. “It was left at he said, she said,” one person familiar with the law firm’s investigation said.
But Gates was often mentioned in the thousands of emails that lawyers reviewed between Epstein and MIT employees, two people familiar with the investigation said. There were references to Gates visiting Epstein’s residences, and Epstein arranging for “Big Macs,” which one of the people said referred to Epstein’s interest in young women—and also the food he was sometimes known to serve to guests at his Manhattan townhouse, on silver platters. Although Gates visited Epstein in Florida, he did not visit the sex offender’s private island. Gates also flew on one of Epstein’s private planes when he had at least two of his own; a former acquaintance of Gates found it curious, remembering the billionaire once declaring that he would never fly on another person’s jet. Gates had been unaware that it was Epstein’s plane, a representative said at the time.
When news of Gates’s ties to Epstein first came tumbling out in 2019, Gates’s media team did what spinmeisters do—they employed a high-visibility strategy that included multiple television appearances, harnessing the press, just as they had after the Microsoft trial. Gates has always maintained that he met with Epstein because he was told that the financier could connect him with a lot of rich donors who could help raise more money for philanthropic causes. “I had several dinners with him hoping that what he said about getting billions of philanthropy for global health through contacts that he had might emerge, and when it looked like it wasn’t a real thing that relationship ended,” Gates told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview. “It was a huge mistake to spend time with him, to give him the credibility of being there.” His discomfort at being asked about Epstein is obvious. Every time he was asked about it in a public setting, Gates offered nothing but regrets and apologies, calling it a mistake and blaming it on poor judgment. In a televised interview in 2021 with Judy Woodruff, then anchor of PBS NewsHour, Gates got visibly shifty and nervous, stammering and fidgeting without providing an iota of information beyond stating his regret and poor judgment, lines that he had delivered repeatedly. When the talk turned to philanthropy, he became much more at ease. In more recent media appearances, Gates has also displayed exasperation about the continual Epstein questions.
But instead of providing a detailed, honest accounting by the billionaire’s representatives, explaining how and why Gates met a convicted sex offender repeatedly, the number of meetings, the subject of those meetings, and why those meetings ended, the Gates media machine put out strongly worded statements designed to obfuscate. The initial strategy, according to two people who were involved in the deliberations, was to shut down the stories rather than giving them air by engaging with reporters. The approach partly came from Gates; one person described it as typical of the billionaire’s evidence-driven mentality where, if a reporter sends a query without supporting evidence, his tendency is to deny. As stories about the extent and nature of Gates’s relationship with Epstein continued to emerge—with supporting evidence—Gates’s team was forced to backtrack and acknowledge some of the events, which only served to increase the persistent speculation and raise more questions about what else Gates had to hide. In 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that Epstein tried to blackmail Gates about the billionaire’s 2010 affair with Mila Antonova, the bridge player. One of several young women who occasionally stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, Antonova had been introduced to Epstein by Nikolic, Gates’s advisor. Just before he died, Epstein updated his will to list Nikolic as the executor of his estate should the two named executors be unable to do so, which the latter said came as a surprise to him.
Why Gates hung around with Epstein may remain a head scratcher forever. By many accounts, Epstein and his larger-than-life behavior was an adventure for Gates, who observed to colleagues that Epstein had an unusual lifestyle, but added that it was not for him. More than once, long before Epstein’s sexual depravations became widely known, the tabloid press had compared Epstein to Jay Gatsby—one of Gates’s favorite fictional characters. In Fitzgerald’s book, Gatsby is an enigmatic character, a social climber with a multimillion-dollar fortune of unclear provenance, who throws lavish parties in his grand mansion on Long Island.
To give Gates the benefit of the doubt, one might assume that employees and longtime associates like Walker and Nikolic told him Epstein was someone worth knowing, especially given his mission to induce more philanthropic giving among the rich. Still, the failure of judgment on Gates’s part is surprising, given that he continued to see Epstein over a four-year timespan despite his former wife’s warning, and because the allegations against Epstein were widely known by the time the two of them were introduced. It’s even more surprising given the media battalions at the Gates Foundation and Gates Ventures, who are paid to maintain the philanthropist’s upstanding public profile and brief him on the backgrounds and expertise of the people he meets. Some senior foundation executives were aware of the interactions between Gates and Epstein and knew that their boss met the disgraced financier at his house several times, but they were not privy to the subject of those visits. Others visited Epstein’s townhouse to discuss the potential donor-advised fund at Gates’s behest, including for lunch. Gates referred to Epstein in at least one instance as a “buddy,” said a person who met Epstein once at “Bill’s behest.” The potential liabilities of dealing with Epstein were flagged to Gates by some employees of Gates Ventures, but the billionaire either chose not to listen, or made the trade-off that Epstein could offer him something that was worth putting aside the image risk. Those employees were also fully aware of the meetings since some were listed on Gates’s schedules, prompting questions about why they were doing business with Epstein. In 2019, when the first stories about Gates’s ties to Epstein emerged in the press, along with the photograph, Cohen, who has a full view into his boss’s calendar and communications, emailed his colleagues to say that associating with the convicted sex offender was “a significant lapse in judgment.” Later, at a meeting to address employee concerns, Cohen seemed to “choke up” as he spoke, one person recalled.
Even a cursory search of Epstein in any database of archived news—or a simple Google search—would reveal enough stories about his questionable behavior and habits to raise red flags. In a 2003 profile of Epstein in Vanity Fair magazine, the journalist Vicky Ward wrote: “His advantage is that no one really seems to know him or his history completely or what his arsenal actually consists of. He has carefully engineered it so that he remains one of the few truly baffling mysteries among New York’s moneyed world. People know snippets, but few know the whole.” The profile mentions that he left Bear Stearns, the investment bank where he got his start, under a cloud. But Ward also reported that billionaires like Tom Pritzker, the chairman of Hyatt Hotels; the real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman; the businessman Ron Perelman; and Black would often stop by his house for dinner.
Epstein appeared occasionally in gossip pages and was routinely referred to as a billionaire (even though he was not), a connoisseur of women, a financier with a small roster of billionaire clients, a property developer, or an employee of Wexner. There were always gossipy tales of multiple young women, particularly from Eastern Europe, in his life. By the mid-2000s, Epstein was making news for his lifestyle and his failed bids to buy media properties. In a 2005 article about executive assistants on Wall Street, The New York Times described him as someone who maintained an office in New York but lived and worked on a private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, with a “three-women executive team, which manages his hectic life for globetrotting and hobnobbing with the likes of former President [Bill] Clinton.” That year, he made news for teaming up with Zuckerman to buy Radar, a magazine founded in 2003 that fizzled for lack of funding, was brought back to life in 2005, but folded once again after only three issues before eventually relaunching under new ownership as an exclusively digital property. Epstein was also mentioned as one among a consortium of buyers for IMG with Teddy Forstmann, and of New York magazine with Zuckerman, Harvey Weinstein, and others. By then, well-known names like Summers and Alan Dershowitz were in his orbit; he got written up for pledging money to Harvard University to launch a program in “evolutionary dynamics” when Summers was the university’s president. Harvard shut down the program in 2020 and revised its donor policies after an internal review.4
At the same time, there were lawsuits against him, including one with Citibank, which said he had defaulted on $20 million of loans from their private bank. When he was arrested in Florida in 2006, after multiple underage girls accused him of sexual assault, major media organizations like the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Guardian, and various Florida newspapers ran stories. And there was yet another flood of coverage when he pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008.
Even when the revelations around Epstein brutalized the reputations of once-powerful men, sending them scurrying to private shelter, Gates, although tainted, somehow managed to remain standing. He had transformed very publicly from an arrogant bully when he stepped away from Microsoft into a sort of patron saint of global public health, and a savior of the developing world. Thus, the two-year stretch that began in the summer of 2019 with news reports about his multiple meetings with Epstein and ended with his 2021 divorce, followed shortly after by accounts of his personal conduct and infidelities, was all the more shocking because of the high moral ground he occupied. Upon hearing the news, one former Microsoft employee said it felt like God had fallen to earth. Gates was suddenly both philanthropist and philanderer, and a womanizer whose foundation worked for women’s rights.
The Gates Foundation, already sensitive to the criticisms about its top-down structure and size, used the opportunity to make changes in its governing structure. In January 2022, it announced a newly created board of trustees, specifying that these trustees were outside of the Gates and Buffett families, to provide input, guidance, and fiduciary oversight to the foundation. It was signaling to the world that it was an institution with clear governance, diverse viewpoints, and credibility. The thinking, according to a person advising on those efforts, was that it was vital for the foundation to manage its institutional reputation, and having it controlled too closely by Gates could become a liability in its work in the nonprofit world—echoing Gates’s move away from Microsoft two decades earlier.
In 2015, Katie Moussouris filed a lawsuit against Microsoft alleging gender-based pay discrimination, describing in detail a sexist culture inside the software giant, where women were openly propositioned. Documents produced in 2018 as part of the suit revealed that there had been at least 238 complaints by women about the internal culture at Microsoft, where women were sexually harassed, passed over for promotions, or paid less than their male counterparts. The suit said that there were systemic problems with the way Microsoft paid and promoted women, and that it discriminated against women based on gender. It also claimed that Microsoft fostered a “boys’ club” atmosphere rife with harassment and discrimination, where female employees returning from maternity leave were asked, “How was your vacation?” It described an environment where male employees would grope and harass their female colleagues at work functions, and complaints to HR went unheeded. Moussouris and her lawyers sought to turn it into a class-action lawsuit, but they dropped the case in 2019 after a judge denied the move. At the time, Microsoft said it did not discriminate on pay based on gender.5 In 2019, the news website Quartz reported about an email chain between female Microsoft employees complaining about sexual harassment and discrimination.6 Women felt systematically undervalued and underpaid, according to the emails. Two years later, after the divorce, news reports about Gates’s behavior when he was at Microsoft—including at least one affair with an employee—added to questions about the company’s culture and values.
Natasha Lamb, a founding partner at an impact investment firm called Arjuna Capital, had been paying attention to the accusations of sexual harassment and gender and pay discrimination at Microsoft. Arjuna, which takes its name from the warrior-hero in the Mahabharata, invests in companies with an eye to their performance on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. With its motto of “enlightened investing” and about $300 million in assets under management, Arjuna Capital is a minnow in the world of giant asset managers. Its shareholder proposals—investors present these at annual meetings to push a company or its directors to act on an issue—often tried to hold companies accountable on gender and pay equity but got little traction. Big shareholders like BlackRock and Vanguard, with trillions of dollars they manage on behalf of pension funds and others, typically vote with management.
Arjuna Capital had met with some success in getting companies to disclose their median gender and racial pay gap ratios. In 2018, some of the biggest Wall Street banks agreed to publicly share the progress they had made to close the gender pay gap, largely due to the efforts of Lamb. But her firm would get stonewalled just as often. Also that year, it had filed a shareholder proposal to get Comcast to conduct an independent board investigation into allegations of workplace sexual harassment, but the company had refused, and other shareholders had not sided with the firm. Arjuna had also teamed up with Time’s Up in 2019 to push Microsoft for a fuller disclosure of racial and gender pay gap disparities, but the not-for-profit, which focuses on creating a safer and more equitable workplace for women, secured a grant from Pivotal Ventures, the firm run by French Gates, around the same time and dropped out of the campaign.
When the reports about Gates’s inappropriate behavior emerged in 2021, including that he had made sexual advances toward Microsoft employees, and that his decision to step down from the board of the company he cofounded had been at least partly driven by a board committee’s investigation into sexual harassment claims against him, Lamb saw a fresh opportunity to push Microsoft.7 That November, during the company’s annual meeting of shareholders, held via teleconference because of the pandemic, Lamb filed a proposal asking Microsoft to “transparently address sexual harassment claims through independent investigations and reporting.” Microsoft had been under intense public scrutiny because of sexual harassment allegations and complaints that the company failed to address them adequately, she said, reading out her statement. The Gates news, she said, added to concerns that the company had a “culture of systemic sexual harassment.” Lamb called for an independent investigation, citing a Harvard study about how a poor workplace culture could be detrimental to investor returns. She also asked for the results of the investigation to be shared publicly in the interest of transparency.
Microsoft dismissed the proposal and asked other investors to do the same. The proposal then went to a vote. When the results came in, Lamb, whose firm owned only about $20 million of Microsoft shares, was both shocked and ecstatic. More than three-quarters of Microsoft’s shareholders, including some of the world’s largest asset managers who collectively held nearly $2 trillion of the company’s stock, had voted in favor of her proposal. Lamb, an ESG investor for two decades, had benefited from the societal vibe shift sparked by the #MeToo movement in 2017, around the time news reports surfaced about how the movie producer Harvey Weinstein sexually abused women. The wider culture had begun reckoning with the impunity of powerful men and in the months following the Weinstein revelations, there was a relentless flood of accusations of sexual abuse and harassment by women against dozens of celebrities, politicians, businessmen, media executives, sportsmen, performers, and others. The lack of accountability inside institutions, many of them with toothless HR departments, also came under scrutiny as people contended with the wide chasm in pay based on gender and color, the systemic racism underpinning public life, and the lackadaisical attitude toward climate change. As social issues began to drive consumer decisions, forcing corporate America to brush up on the language of diversity and inclusion, and burnish their earth-friendly credentials, big investors were suddenly paying attention. Investing with an eye to ESG was becoming popular, and Lamb found herself becoming an “influencer.” The overwhelming support from shareholders for her proposal forced Microsoft to agree to an independent investigation, and to do more to reduce racial and gender pay gaps. The law firm that conducted the investigation recommended that Microsoft strengthen its sexual harassment and gender discrimination policies. Microsoft said it would strengthen its policies, including making executives undergo training and promoting more women to senior roles.
“What galvanized the support from investors was that there was this a-ha moment, not only about Epstein but also Gates’s employee relationships and whether there was more, and questions around how the board addressed these allegations and whether his departure was on a voluntary basis,” Lamb reflected. “It was a combination of the high-profile allegations against Gates and the track record of unresolved sexual harassment issues around the company which had been going around for years” that led to the support. One way of interpreting Gates’s behavior is to look at it through the lens of the work environment he grew up in, according to people who have observed him from up close. The early culture of tech companies consisted of a largely male workforce, and the gender segregation was clear. Female employees were noticeable more for their absence. When they existed, many were in positions as handlers to male executives or in supporting functions. Coders and engineers, who were mostly male, didn’t necessarily get reprimanded for lewd or sexist behavior. After bouts of programming and meeting deadlines, largely male workforces often let off steam at bars and strip joints. In the 1980s and 1990s, Microsoft was well known for hiring skimpily dressed performers and escorts to weave their way through the guests at company parties or industry events. Gates was often on the dance floor shimmying with women late into the night. Even as recently as March 2016, Microsoft’s Xbox unit hired go-go dancers to perform on the podium on the same day that the unit hosted a “women in gaming” lunch at a game developers’ conference. The head of the unit apologized the following day.
Maria Klawe first met Gates in 1987 at an industry conference and got to know him better when she joined Microsoft’s board in 2008. In her seventies, Klawe is the former president of Harvey Mudd, a small college in Claremont, California, that focuses on science and engineering. A computer scientist with a doctoral degree in mathematics and honorary doctorate degrees from about 20 universities in Canada, where she is from, Klawe is one of the few high-profile women in a field dominated by men. She has long made it a priority to advocate for more women in the fields of science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM). When the topic of succession planning at Microsoft came up at a board meeting not long after she joined, Klawe asked why the list of 50 or so people included no women.
“Are you fucking trying to destroy the company?” Gates shot back, in Klawe’s telling. She recalled being stunned at the response. “This is my belief about Bill,” said Klawe, who has since become openly critical of Gates. “One of the consequences of having been so successful in building Microsoft is that he truly believes that he is the smartest person in the world. That for an academic computer scientist to ask [the question of women successors] just meant I had no idea what it took to be successful at Microsoft.” Klawe said that during her time on the board of Microsoft, there were no mentions of Epstein since his contact with Gates was tied to the foundation’s work, and that she never heard any discussion of allegations of sexual harassment. But there were complaints about “Bill yelling and screaming at employees,” she said. In 2014, Microsoft appointed Satya Nadella as its chief executive officer. Nadella, only the third chief executive of the nearly 40-year-old company, was more attuned to the changing mores around him than his predecessors. He promised a kinder and gentler Microsoft. Still, early on in Nadella’s tenure, Klawe asked him at a public event she was moderating what women should do to get paid more in their professions. Nadella responded by saying that women should trust the system and that they would be rewarded for their labor. The gaffe was a public relations disaster for Nadella, who subsequently apologized for his comments to Microsoft employees, and said he would work to address the challenges women faced inside the company. The board asked for Klawe’s resignation several months later. She said she was hurt by the move, and it took her a while to get to a point where she could talk about it publicly. “I felt horrible and if I talked about it, I would never get on a public company board again,” she said. “And that turned out to be true.”
Travis Chapman doesn’t consider himself a conspiracy theorist. He describes himself as a dad and a normal guy who runs his own roofing company in Spokane, Washington. Some years ago, he became obsessed with painting, and turned to The Joy of Painting on PBS to learn techniques from Bob Ross, America’s beloved painting instructor who taught via television. In his soothing, dulcet tones, Ross, with his fuzzy globe of a perm, dabbing a little ochre here, using his spatula to create some texture there, shows Americans how easy it is to paint. Chapman leaned toward satirical art and began putting his paintings up for sale on Etsy. A local restaurant or two commissioned his work. Finding a small measure of success, he began to spend more time in his studio, and eventually turned to art full-time.
Gates was not someone Chapman thought about much. “He was just kind of a famous guy, a go-to guy if you were gonna make a billionaire joke, super nerdy.” But suddenly, during the Covid pandemic, Gates was unmissable, talking about vaccines and public health. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer,” Chapman said. But something about Gates’s omnipresence put him off, striking him as some sort of pandemic performance. What were his motives? Why was he pushing vaccines at a time when there were questions about their efficacy and side effects? “If I’m going to listen to someone about Covid, it would be a doctor or an epidemiologist,” Chapman said. “Why is the Microsoft guy talking?” His friends, including one he described as a full-blown conspiracy theorist, shared the same unease. As Chapman began scrutinizing Gates closely, he was convinced that the philanthropist, with his V-necked sweaters and collared shirts, was channeling Mister Rogers in a very deliberate way. “He would never be in a ten-thousand-dollar suit that he could easily afford,” Chapman said. “He always dressed down to be relatable. It felt like a costume that he was wearing.” Why?
“It’s totally Mister Rogers. He is universally loved and it’s almost like Bill Gates was trying to be Mister Rogers but Gates had a nefarious purpose,” Chapman ventured. If Gates had once existed as an easy shorthand for a billionaire joke among friends, his vaccine activism made Chapman wonder why Gates was so insistent. “I don’t believe anything about you,” he said of Gates. “You’re putting out this image that I don’t trust.” He decided to turn his suspicions into art. In his painting, an acrylic on canvas measuring 16 inches by 20 inches, Chapman depicts Gates dressed in a red sweater with all the accoutrements of Mister Rogers. There is a syringe in the upper right corner. Gates is painted in the style of a comic strip, almost, his head large in proportion to the rest of his body. Chapman put it up on his Etsy page for $800. As of spring 2024, it hadn’t found any takers yet. “I guess no one wants to look at it everyday, lol,” Chapman said. The art itself is one thing. But the thinking that provoked Chapman’s painting is indicative of how Gates’s image evolved—not only in the mainstream of society but also in its rivulets, where it floats amid the flotsam of half-truths, mistrust, and disinformation.
Conspiracy theories—defined loosely as beliefs that elites and institutions, including the media, governments, and powerful individuals, collectively wield their power to achieve malevolent outcomes—have a long and robust history. They are similar to myths in that they provide an explanation for the inexplicable. But unlike myths, which exist in plain view and feed into the bigger storyline of humankind, conspiracy theories often are narratives involving an “us” and a “them,” employing fabulism to sow distrust of power and authority. They have immense staying power, especially in societies deeply cleaved by political polarization, inequality, and racial and religious divides, filling the informational void created by a rapidly unspooling crisis or by a slowly widening chasm caused by a breakdown of trust between social and political groups.
Marita Sturken, a professor of visual arts at New York University who has studied the culture of paranoia that often drives conspiracy theories, said that they can provide a way for people to make sense of random events. “It’s very hard to make our peace with the fact that life is arbitrary, and that things often happen in life that have no reasons other than say, bad luck or tragedy,” Sturken said. Conspiracy theories are therefore comforting to people and can make them feel grounded. In particular, for disaffected groups, it is often easier to accept the idea that an anonymous power is orchestrating events—a dark state with an agenda, a cabal of billionaires pulling the strings—than settling for the reality of chaotic societies, tectonic shifts in work culture, and messy governments.8
One study of letters published in The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune between 1890 and 2010 found that conspiracy theories were prevalent, but that they increased during periods of rising inequality and diminishing trust in institutions.9 There were a multitude of conspiracy theories in circulation in the early twentieth century, a time of great inequality spurred by the Industrial Revolution. The study found that conspiracy theories also rose in the period immediately following the Second World War. McCarthyism, the name given to Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy’s years-long witch hunt for alleged communists in American institutions during the Cold War era, was one of the most popular. Conspiracy theorists were behind the rumor that John F. Kennedy was killed by the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing lit up the internet with conspiracies, as some outlandish theories took hold, including that Timothy McVeigh, one of the suspects, was a “zombie” controlled by the government.
Conspiracy theorists whipped up false narratives about former president Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the 1990s. They villainized the left-wing billionaire George Soros and the right-wing Koch brothers. More recently, the falsehood circulated that former president Barack Obama had been elected in 2008 because of the efforts of a group of Democratic bankers.10 Both during his presidential runs and his two terms in the White House, Obama was also dogged by conspiracies about his religion and birthplace that secured a lot of airtime, because Donald Trump, Obama’s successor, constantly brought up those theories on his social media feeds and in public appearances. Conspiracy theories promoted by alt-right extremists became far more mainstream in the four years that Trump occupied the White House. The rise of the internet and social media has given conspiracy theorists a vast landscape upon which to plant the seeds of misinformation. Right-wing extremists like Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, have built multimillion-dollar businesses peddling misinformation, disinformation, and wild antigovernment theories. In late 2022, Jones was ordered to pay $1.4 billion to the families of those who were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. For years, Jones had called the mass shooting a hoax. Jones also encouraged supporters of Trump to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
One of the most potent internet-centric conspiracy theory communities is QAnon. Its origins unknown, QAnon has become a receptacle for all kinds of conspiracy myths in recent years, a lumbering, mutating monster of falsehoods that attracts a diverse group of followers, including yoga moms, right-wing extremists, and Wall Street executives. However, at its heart is the core belief that a pedophile ring runs the world, controlling the media and institutions. In an Ipsos poll conducted for NPR in December 2020, only 47 percent of the respondents believed that the following statement is untrue: “A group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.” More than one-third responded that they were unsure, and 17 percent said it was true. The coronavirus pandemic, which seemed to come out of nowhere and spread with such speed and fury that it caught governments, doctors, and public health experts off guard, provided the perfect raw material for conspiracy theorists, on both the right and left. Gates, with his high visibility during the pandemic, was an easy target. As a philanthropist, Gates had long put himself out there as an advocate for global public health. In 2015, he gave an eight-minute TED talk in Vancouver entitled, “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready.” Tanned and dressed in a pink sweater, he pushed a barrel onstage, the kind he said they had at home when he was a kid, because the biggest threat then was a nuclear war. If that happened, they were supposed to go to the basement and live off the supplies stored in that barrel. Fast forward 50 years and the biggest threat, Gates said, was not missiles but microbes. He told the rapt audience that the world was unprepared for a global pandemic, which he expected to be the biggest threat to humanity. A prophet of doom, Gates advocated for a military-style response to a potential pandemic.11 Five years later, as the world reeled from the pandemic, the video became a viral sensation, viewed more than 37 million times. Gates became an oracle, but to a group of people, like Chapman, the Etsy painter, he also represented something far more sinister. How had Gates known it was coming?
An ardent supporter of vaccines given his foundation’s work, Gates talked nonstop about the effectiveness of coronavirus shots at a time when the world was rife with misinformation about them. Gates was essentially in a public service announcement role for governments everywhere. He penned articles and went on popular shows hosted by Stephen Colbert and Ellen DeGeneres. He even wrote an essay for The New England Journal of Medicine—which typically publishes medical research—about how to coordinate a pandemic response. At the same time, the Gates Foundation was working closely with pharmaceutical companies and governments on vaccines. His public presence was so widespread that people like Chapman, who only had a passing acquaintance with Gates as a philanthropist and the cofounder of Microsoft, began questioning his motives.
One persistent conspiracy theory is that Gates engineered the coronavirus and was leveraging it for profit and population control. The evidence: the video of his prescient TED talk in 2015. Another theory held that Gates was pushing for vaccines so that he could implant microchips into people to surveil them. The germ of that theory was that the Gates Foundation and MIT had conducted a study about the feasibility of storing vaccine information in a microchip implanted under a patient’s skin, akin to a digital certificate.12 The conspiracy theories about vaccines and microchips, vaccines and depopulation, and vaccines and death by the thousands were picked up by anti-vaccinators on the left and right, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Roger Stone, and Laura Ingraham. As they gained steam, Fox News carried stories about the conspiracy theories, which in turn conferred upon them more legitimacy. Concerted efforts by the Russian government to sow disinformation on social media sites added to the general noise. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the pandemic, who often appeared with Gates in public, was also the target of conspiracy theories. Kennedy authored a book called The Real Anthony Fauci that purported to uncover a scheme between Fauci and Gates; the claims made in his book are unproven. Yet, Fauci didn’t get the kind of raucous attention from conspiracy theorists that Gates did—perhaps because, as Chapman the artist said, Gates’s advocacy in a field that he didn’t belong to seemed suspicious, or perhaps because of his immense wealth, which conferred upon one individual a nearly unrivaled power. It didn’t help that Gates had been critical of Trump’s statements about the virus, including its cure, citing studies that undermined his claims.13 The conspiracy theories were so rampant during the pandemic that more than a quarter of Americans believed that Gates wanted to implant microchips through vaccines, according to a 2020 poll by YouGov, a British market research firm that works with government clients but often conducts paid online surveys on a variety of themes. Also that year, another YouGov poll found that Gates was no longer the world’s most admired man—a title he held from 2014 to 2019. In explaining the fall, the pollsters said it was potentially because of the rumors “that he is in some way involved in the spread of Covid-19.”14
Gates was keenly aware that with his lack of professional expertise, he might be perceived in a negative light as he shared the pulpit with Fauci and other public health experts, telling people to get vaccinated and wear masks. In a discussion on the platform formerly known as Twitter with Devi Sridhar, an expert on global public health, Gates tried to combat the misinformation. The Gates Foundation posted an FAQ on its website to explain its role in vaccines and to rebut rumors about microchips. It addressed questions such as “Did Bill Gates know the pandemic was coming?” and “Why are vaccine trials being conducted in Africa?” Gates couldn’t help but seem bewildered, even personally wounded, by the misinformation and conspiracy theories that singled him out, calling them stupid and strange and almost too ridiculous to address. “I’m experiencing the greatest pushback ever in my life, and [am] somewhat unsure how to deal with that,” he told The Washington Post.15