Bill Gates announces divorce from wife Melinda

ogether, they built a charitable empire through Bill's technology company Microsoft and the massive non-profit they co-founded and co-chair, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And when it came time to announce Monday the end of their 27-year marriage, they did that as a pair too in a joint statement posted to their respective Twitter accounts at exactly the same moment.

Gates, 65, summed it up like this in a 2019 Netflix documentary series: "In the case of Melinda, it is truly an equal partner."

"She's a lot like me in that she is optimistic and she is interested in science. She is better with people than I am. She's a tiny bit less hard core about knowing, you know, immunology, than I am."