What We Know—and Don't Know—About Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein

Four years after the relationship between Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein was first made public, surprisingly little is known about it, largely because Gates and his public-relations team have consistently refused to answer basic questions, concealed information, and said things that aren’t exactly true. Gates has expressed exasperation at being asked questions about Epstein, claiming to have answered them “for the hundredth time,” but never has said how many times the two met, or when. And because much of what he has said has proved to be, at best, misleading, his explanations of the nature of the relationship lack credibility.

All of this has had paradoxical effects on the public’s understanding of the relationship between the one-time world’s wealthiest man and the now-deceased child sex trafficker who was mysteriously close to some of the world’s most powerful people, including former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. A sort of version of Gresham’s Law has been at play, with bad information driving out good. Everyone already knows about Gates and Epstein, even if much of what they know—such as the claim, which periodically goes viral, that Gates visited Epstein’s private island dozens of times—isn’t actually true. This means that genuinely new information, such as that contained in a Wall Street Journal story published this week, doesn’t have quite the impact it might. Gates’ strategy of obfuscation has left him closely associated with the infamous criminal, but also created confusion that diminishes the power of new revelations. 

The effect of all this is that the public remains in the dark about the nature of the close association between one of the world’s most powerful men and the financier who sexually exploited dozens of children, which began after Epstein had already been convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution, in 2008, and served just over a year in prison. (Later, the sweetheart deal he obtained from prosecutors would be revealed by the Miami Herald, and a series of reports would lay out the cottage industry that sprang up around Epstein systematically paying off and silencing his victims.)

The Journal’s story is based on calendars the paper’s reporters obtained, and documents one day—September 8, 2014—on which Epstein had arranged to meet with several powerful figures in New York. Among them was Gates, with whom he was scheduled to spend six hours spread across meetings with four different people at four different locations, including Epstein’s townhouse. It also documents four additional days on which Epstein and Gates were, according to Epstein’s calendar, scheduled to meet, at least three of which appear to have been previously unknown. This is extremely significant because it substantially increases the amount of specific, known meetings between the two, and shows that they were meeting on specific dates late into 2014—after, in fact, the relationship had caused conflict between Gates and his then wife, Melinda French Gates, which would ultimately end in their divorce. 

“As Bill has said many times before,” a spokesperson told the Journal, “it was a mistake to have ever met with him and he deeply regrets it.” This is the line Gates has gone with for years. To understand just how inadequate an explanation it is requires understanding what we definitely know about his relationship with Epstein, and how we know it.

In August 2019, four days after Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell, CNBC reported that Gates and Epstein had “spoke[n] more than once” and met at least once, in New York, in 2013, after which Gates, according to “people with knowledge of the matter,” flew to Palm Beach on Epstein’s private plane. A spokesperson told the network “Epstein never provided tax, estate or services of any kind to Bill Gates.” 

A bit more than two weeks later, Franceinfo reported that according to Epstein’s handyman, Gates and French Gates had been guests at Epstein’s luxury apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris. 

“Any hint of a business or personal relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill and Melinda Gates,” a spokesperson told the outlet, “is totally false."

Around this time, the Wall Street Journal interviewed Gates, who was promoting a Netflix documentary about himself. Asked to describe his relationship with Epstein, Gates said, “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him. I didn’t go to New Mexico or Florida or Palm Beach or any of that.”

A week after that, on September 6, 2019, the New Yorker published a report about the relationship between Epstein and the MIT Media Lab. In October 2014, Gates had donated $2 million to the lab; an email from director Joi Ito the magazine obtained said, “This is a $2M gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein.” A spokesperson told the magazine that “any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grantmaking for Bill Gates is completely false.”

Several days later, the Journal interview, which took place before the New Yorker broke the MIT story, was published, carrying a statement from a Gates spokesperson: “Although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively, any account of a business partnership or personal relationship between the two is simply not true. And any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grantmaking for Bill Gates is completely false.”

On October 12, 2019, the New York Times published what was and remains the most in-depth examination of the relationship between the software tycoon and the criminal.

“Mr. Gates met with Mr. Epstein on numerous occasions,” the Times reported, “including at least three times at Mr. Epstein’s palatial Manhattan townhouse, and at least once staying late into the night.” According to the paper, the two men were introduced by Boris Nikolic, the science adviser for Gates’ multi-billion dollar foundation. The report identified three distinct occasions in 2011 on which the two had met—a party in January at Epstein’s townhouse; a conference in March in Long Beach, California; and a get-together in May, again at Epstein’s townhouse, where they were surrounded by the likes of Nikolic and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers—as well as one occasion in September 2013, when the two met for dinner in New York. It also identified an occasion in March 2013 when Gates flew to Palm Beach on Epstein’s private airplane from New Jersey, though it wasn’t clear if this was the same 2013 flight on which CNBC had reported.

“Bill Gates regrets ever meeting with Epstein and recognizes it was an error in judgment to do so,” Bridgitt Arnold, a spokesperson for Gates, told the Times. She asserted that her client, who had spent decades as the richest or one of the richest men in the world and had the security apparatus of a head of state, had flown on Epstein’s private plane without knowing whose it was. She would not say how many times the two had met.

As of October  2019, then, despite the various carefully-phrased denials of a business or personal relationship he made and that were made on his behalf, reports, which Gates did not dispute, documented at least five distinct meetings between him and Epstein over a period of nearly three years, four in New York and one in Long Beach. It had also been reported that Gates had flown on Epstein’s private plane and visited his Paris apartment. 

This all amounted to solid evidence of a substantial relationship of some kind between the two men—and as the person closest to Gates was aware, there was more the public didn’t know.

When the Times published its investigation into the relationship, the Wall Street Journal would report years later, Melinda French Gates held calls with divorce lawyers. One issue that led her to want to end the marriage, the paper reported—accurately, as she confirmed last year in an interview with CBS—was her husband’s relationship with Epstein. She was also aware of another meeting between the two men, in September 2013, which hadn’t been made public and wouldn’t be until the Daily Beast reported it in 2021. She knew about it because she had been at it and, according to the Beast, “soon after said she was furious at the relationship.”

“I wanted to see who this man was, and I regretted it from the second I stepped in the door,” she told CBS. “I had nightmares about it afterwards.”

Two years ago, the Daily Beast reported that Gates and Epstein had in fact met dozens of times, into 2014, and that Epstein had counseled Gates on his struggling marriage. “Your characterization of his meetings with Epstein and others about philanthropy is inaccurate,” a spokesperson told the Beast.

While it’s possible this review inadvertently omits other information, all of this together amounts to about what we knew about the relationship between Gates and Epstein before the Journal published its story this week. We knew they had met at least six times between 2011 and 2013 and perhaps as many as dozens of times as late as 2014; that the relationship played a key role in precipitating Gates’ divorce; and that Gates denied there was any business or personal relationship between him and Epstein before extensive documentation of the relationship caused him to shift to simply expressing regret for meeting with Epstein in an attempt to secure billions of dollars for global public-health projects.

The Journal’s reporting establishes that the two were regularly meeting later than had previously been specifically documented, including in the months leading up to the $2 million gift to MIT Media Lab that MIT’s internal records show as having been “directed” by Epstein. (Due to opaque labeling of a graphic, it’s not clear if the earliest meeting documented in the calendars was in September 2013, and if so whether it’s one of the two meetings that month that was previously reported on, so it isn’t clear exactly how many new meetings were revealed.)

In the years since his ties to Epstein were first reported on, Gates has repeatedly addressed them in public. In 2019, at a DealBook conference, he described the relationship as “a mistake in judgment.” In 2021, he told CNN ““It was a huge mistake to spend time with him.” This year, he told Australia’s ABC “I shouldn’t have had dinners with him” and expressed exasperation at having to answer questions about the subject for “the hundredth time.” 

There are many open questions about the exact nature of the relationship between Gates and Epstein. Saying so doesn't imply that the answers must be untoward, or that Gates’ explanation that he met with Epstein to discuss philanthropy and ended the relationship after it became clear that continued dialogue would prove fruitless is untrue. Given the Journal’s reporting this week, though, the most basic and easily answered questions, which Gates could address with one number and two dates, seem more important than ever: How many times did he meet Jeffrey Epstein, and when did he do so for the first and last time? It can’t be a surprise that in the absence of such basic information, conspiracy theories, some ridiculous and some less so, would thrive.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated a date in 2014.