As the Bill and Melinda Gates divorce continues to unfold and intrigue the world, an old story is resurfacing that some feel may hint at “why.”

Following 27 years of marriage, the Gates’ announced they are seeking a divorce. Given the amount of publicity they’ve recieved over the past year in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine developments, divorce was an unlikely bet.

But an old article in Time might hint at a deeper detail into why a Gates’ divorce now seems inevitable. If anything, it’s leading to speculation that all things were certainly not what they seemed between Bill and Melinda.

Gates apparently maintained a relationship with ex-girlfriend Ann Winblad. So much so, he asked Melinda to agree to allow him to take one annual vacation a year with Ann. And Ann only. Seems absurd? Of course.

“Another of Gates’ vacation companions is Ann Winblad, the software entrepreneur and venture capitalist he dated during the 1980s,” Isaacson writes. “They met in 1984 at a Ben Rosen-Esther Dyson computer conference and started going on ‘virtual dates’ by driving to the same movie at the same time in different cities and discussing it on their cell phones. For a few years she even persuaded him to stop eating meat, an experiment he has since resolutely abandoned.”

“They broke up in 1987, partly because Winblad, five years older, was more ready for marriage,” the article continues. “But they remain close friends. ‘When I was off on my own thinking about marrying Melinda,’ Gates says, ‘I called Ann and asked for her approval.’ She gave it. ‘I said she’d be a good match for him because she had intellectual stamina.’ Even now, Gates has an arrangement with his wife that he and Winblad can keep one vacation tradition alive. Every spring, as they have for more than a decade, Gates spends a long weekend with Winblad at, where they ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach.”

“They were kindred minds as well as spirits. On a vacation to Brazil, he took James Watson’s 1,100-page textbook, Molecular Biology of the Gene, and they studied bioengineering together. On another vacation, to a Santa Barbara, California, ranch, she took tapes of Richard Feynman’s lectures at Cornell, and they studied physics.”

The divorce of the decade just got a little odder, it appears.

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