Epstein's Trump Connections Were A Nothingburger -- Bill Gates Is Something Else
But to the Rockefellers' credit, Lee had to have something to work with. If they followed his advice and told the truth, after all, there had to be something good to tell the truth about. Sonehow, even if Ivy Lee were still around, Bill Gates wouldn't have been such a successful client. A Wall Street Journal piece reports Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It’s Cracking.
Bill Gates’s employees have spent years carefully cultivating his image—down to keeping a custom-size mannequin to test his outfits for different days of the week.
A styling group stores troves of neutral tone crew and V-neck sweaters, button-down shirts, slacks and extra pairs of the Silver Lining Opticians “Carbon” glasses at an off-site building, current and former employees said. Once options are selected for public-facing engagements, employees usually send three options for approval by senior staff. The goal: to depict someone calm and approachable, like Mister Rogers.
But even if you're rich, your staff can do only so much. In the 1990s, he visited a tech company I worked for, and although his button-down collar was buttoned, one one side, his tie came down outside the button. His personal life overall seems to have been something like that -- maybe it still is:
His carefully crafted image has been shattered as more details of Gates’s association with the late Jeffrey Epstein have spilled into public view, challenging prior efforts by the 70-year-old to downplay his relationship with the sex offender. In a February town hall with foundation employees, Gates owned up to two affairs with Russian women referenced in Epstein’s emails.
Some people familiar with the matter said they heard about his admission to staff with disbelief: In his divorce proceedings, allegations related to more than 20 affairs had come up.
His relationships with employees at both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation appear to have been complex and incestuous:
Now, several women have reported that Gates engaged in inappropriate sexual misconduct or sexual advances over the past few decades while he was married. He allegedly made sexual advances and pursued sexual relations with women who worked for him at Microsoft and at his philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Specifically, in 2019, Microsoft’s board of director, on which Gates sat at the time, opened an investigation into one of the claims after it received notice that Gates had pursued an “intimate relationship” with an employee back in 2000.
Gates was also accused of having a multi-year romantic relationship with one of the company’s female engineers. After the allegations, Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board, but continues to serve as a technology adviser at the company. His spokespeople say that this decision did not relate to the alleged affair.
Melanie Walker, an Epstein protegee whom he initially recruited by claiming he could get her work as a lingerie model for Victoria's Secret, later served both as his "science adviser" and a date for then-Prince Andrew, and still later worked for the Gates Foundation and served as a back-channel interface between Gates and Epstein. At the same time, she began a relationship with Steven Sinofsky, who had become a technical assistant to Gates. She later moved in with him, continuing a close connection between the Epstein and Gates worlds. The WSJ continues,
Justice Department files show that Gates met with Epstein multiple times despite concerns from his then-wife, that Epstein knew about some of Gates’s extramarital relationships and that two of Gates’s close advisers had exchanged hundreds of messages with Epstein for years up until 2019, the year he died. [One of these two was Melanie Walker, Sinofsky's live-in.]
Fallout from the revelations about Gates’s behavior is now eroding efforts to protect his reputation. Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was recently snubbed from the company’s annual CEO summit and from the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, which he has attended for years.
Allegations of sexual misconduct continue to bubble up in connection with his business activities:
In early March, a House committee investigating the Epstein case sent letters to Gates and other high-profile Epstein associates seeking their testimony. The next week, Gates’s nuclear power company TerraPower was engaging in its own form of reputational damage control.
On March 9, TerraPower gave employees three days’ notice of a virtual all-hands meeting, without saying why, according to an internal document. Usually the company gives staff weeks’ notice.
During the meeting, CEO Chris Levesque reiterated Gates’s talking points. Levesque told employees to expect to hear more about Gates’s ties to Epstein in the coming months given the upcoming congressional questioning. He acknowledged receiving employee concerns through an anonymous program, managers and human resources on the matter, which he described as “troubling.” He also told staff that he had talked to Gates’s private office and “it is clear it doesn’t involve TerraPower.”
“There’s no connection to any TerraPower activities, even the two affairs that Bill had to share with the broader public, and his regrets on those, had nothing to do with TerraPower,” according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by the Journal. He encouraged employees to stay “mission-focused.”
Several current and former employees found that confusing—and privately talked to each other about how it wasn’t true. One of the women Gates had referred to having had an affair with—a “Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities,” he had said in his foundation town hall—was closely tied to TerraPower.
She worked at TerraPower from 2010 to 2012, according to her LinkedIn page, and her name was even in TerraPower’s internal system. She had been featured in a 2011 magazine article about her TerraPower work, including a photo shoot with Gates and TerraPower Vice Chair Nathan Myhrvold, a longtime Gates confidant.
What's beginning to come out is that Bill Gates doesn't seem ever to have been able to keep his trousers zipped, which his position as a person of wealth and influence facilitated -- but he also doesn't seem to have been able to keep that part of his life separate from his position of wealth and influence. Whatever Trump may or may not have done, he seems to have been much more successful at keeping things separate. This is going to come back and bite Gates, whOse judgment seems to be so poor that legions of staff can't protect him from it.