Good morning! Harvey Weinstein is back on trial, Jane Fraser isn't stressed about Citi's exposure to a trade war, and Fortune’s Michal Lev-Ram talks with Melinda French Gates about divorce and her new book.
- Open book. Anyone who has been through a divorce knows that it's not just disruptive to the two people untangling their lives from each other, but to everyone they're connected to. But few women—or men, for that matter—have to consider the ramifications philanthropist Melinda French Gates did when separating from her ex-husband, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates.
In a new book published this week, titled The Next Day, French Gates opens up about her divorce—among other life-changing transitions she has lived through in the last few years. "I loved Bill," French Gates writes in one of the book’s chapters. "Not only that, but I valued our family life deeply—and I felt enormous responsibility to the foundation we’d started together. Was I going to rip all that apart? Was I going to forgo the future we’d imagined for so long?"
French Gates and Gates started their eponymous foundation back in 2000, with the aim of "creating a world where every person has the opportunity to live a healthy, productive life." But the duo divorced in 2021, and last year, French Gates stepped away from the $75 billion organization they had built together. Her new focus? Devoting 100% of her time to Pivotal, the investment and advocacy firm she launched in 2015.
In a recent interview with Fortune on her new book, French Gates talked about how these tectonic shifts have changed her as a person and as a leader. For starters, she says she's gotten a lot more comfortable with being "vulnerable." Clearly, she's also gotten a lot more comfortable with being open not just about her work but about herself.
That said, French Gates says she was sensitive to the ripple effect her divorce could have, including on the foundation. So before announcing the split, the former couple made a phone call to Warren Buffett, their friend and benefactor—the billionaire has given more than $39 billion to the Gates Foundation over the years.
"I mean, he had made this enormous investment in the foundation," French Gates told Fortune, "and so whatever decision he would eventually need to make or not make about that was his. We both felt strongly he was one of the first people we needed to tell."
While notifying Buffett is certainly not on the to-do list of most women getting divorced, French Gates shares plenty of other, more relatable anecdotes about her divorce in the book. One example: pulling over to cry in the car while listening to Willie Nelson's song, Always on My Mind, right after telling Gates she wanted a divorce.
For more on the interview with French Gates, click here.
Michal Lev-Ram
michal.levram@fortune.com
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