“Even in the most amicable divorces I’ve seen, the preference has been to split the foundation in two so that there’s more autonomy and less intermingling,” she said. The same principle applies to family offices, where the investments could be divvied up into two separate pots.
'Challenging Stretch’
Washington law may offer some clues to how they divide their assets. As a community property state, anything acquired during a marriage is considered equally owned by both partners, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the fortune would be split in half.
“It is not a mandatory 50-50,” said Janet George, a family lawyer in Washington with the firm McKinley Irvin. “The courts can award more or less, depending on what is just and equitable.” The public might never find out how they split the fortune, because it can be hidden behind private contracts, she said.
Washington mandates a 90-day cooling off period from the day a couple initially files for divorce before the process can be finalized by a judge. The couple’s divorce filing—listing Melinda as the petitioner and Bill as joining, with both of them signing—asks the court to dissolve their marriage on a date noted in their separation agreement.
“It’s been a challenging stretch of time for our whole family,” their eldest daughter, Jennifer, wrote on Instagram.
Their youngest child is 18.
Becoming Philanthropists
The pair met in New York in the 1980s, early into Melinda’s time at Microsoft. When deciding whether to marry, Bill made a pro-and-con list on a whiteboard—Melinda related how she walked into his bedroom to find him tabulating various factors in the Netflix documentary series “Inside Bill’s Brain.”
The couple’s philanthropy has always been deeply rooted in their relationship and marriage. The day before they wed in Hawaii, Bill’s mother, Mary, who had been trying to convince him to dramatically increase his charity, gave Melinda a letter which closed with the words “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” Mary Gates died several months later.
But it was on a trip to Africa during their engagement that the couple decided they would become serious philanthropists.
“We fell in love with everything we saw but it’s really not at all trite to say that we really fell in love with the people,” Melinda said at a Salesforce event in 2016. “It just started us on this series of questions of sort of saying to ourselves, ‘What is going on here?’”
Later on in the trip, the couple filled out a marriage questionnaire to make sure they had the same values. That’s when they decided “the vast majority of resources from Microsoft would go back to society,” Melinda said. “It was an easy discussion. We just thought it would be later in our lives when we got to do it.”
—With assistance from Anders Melin, Robert Burnson and Steven Crabill.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.