What's Happening To Poor Bill Gates?

One of the ways the very rich are different from you and me is that they normally hire publicity firms to keep them out of the news, not in it. So why is Bill Gates such a hot topic now? Jeff Bezos, another guy in his league, went through a divorce in 2019 with hardly a blip on the radar. Even Donald Trump's exes kept quiet about the guy (I assume his lawyers put non-disparagement clauses in the settlements, but that's what smart people do).

Other lizard people, like Warren Buffett, maintain a carefuily manicured public image. Laurene Powell Jobs is normally just invisible. How are we all of a sudden finding out that Gates, whom everyone thought was just a shy, retiring nerd, was a party animal with an Epstein problem? This may in part be due to a basically unkempt nature -- I was at an industry presentation in the 1990s where he gave a speech with his tie coming out the wrong side of his button-down collar -- but this in turn may have been not so much nerdiness as figuring he's so rich he can get away with it.

Just months before the messy divorce hit the news, Gates had already got himself into public hot water:

“I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef,” Gates told Technology Review. “You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.”

Many readers on Twitter aren’t ready to completely give up their burgers and steaks just yet. So this led to Gates’ trending on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon as critics chewed him out.

It's certainly possible that his wife, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's PR firm, had been able to keep the guy quiet for a couple of decades, but with the marriage crumbling, he no longer gave a flip. Now Melinda is saying she doesn't just want a divorce, she wants a Catholic annulment. We may assume that if Newt Gingrich was able to get two of them, Melinda can surely get just one.

Last night, my wife and I were watching a TV show from 2013 about Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine. It featured a cleaned-up Bill Gates explaining vaccines to the rest of us and mentioning that the Bill and Melinda foundation was doing many good works in the vaccine field. In fact, there were clips in the show of the duo visiting vaccine centers in the Third World, but based on what we now hear, these must have been carefully staged, with the couple doing all they could not to look like they despised each other.

The Bill Gates of 2013 can't reprise that role in 2021. In fact, if he has his own PR flack at all now, he'd probably be told to keep quiet about the flatulent cows from now on as well.

But Melinda is proving not to be a Laurene Powell Jobs either. I would guess that the stories we've been getting about the nude swimming parties and the weekends with his ex-girlfriend are coming from Melinda, or more accurately Melinda's publicist, or maybe even more accurately, Melinda's publicist working closely with her divorce attorney. There was no pre-nup, there were 27 years of marriage with three kids, and Gates is worth somethiong well north of $100 billion. Compared to that, Laurene Powell Jobs is chump change.

What does this do to Gates's standing as a lizard person, which is to say, one of the people who actually run the planet? It's hard to say. It's possible that if he had an Epstein problem, he wasn't taken as seriously as we may have thought, as this sort of thing would presumably have been known among the more influential lizard people -- and after all, nobody's rushing in to rescue Ghislaine Maxwell at this point. There've been no think pieces in the Atlantic on how we shouldn't rush to judgment on Epstein, either, least of all from Alan Dershowitz.

As a lizard person, Gates is suddenly coming off as a phony and a lightweight. My question is how long this was known to the regulars at Davos, though they're largely phonies and lightweights themselves.