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Not a lot of women can say they are single billionaires but that's two things Melinda Gates and Mackenzie Scott have in common, along with being mothers. The ex-wife of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, respectively, have struck up a friendship.
Melinda and Bill announced their divorce in May 2021 before it emerged that he had an affair with a Microsoft employee in 2000. He left the board in 2020 after a 2019 internal investigation. The couple shares Jennifer, 28, Rory, 25, and Phoebe, 21.
In an interview with The New York Times, Melinda confirmed that she and Mackenzie are friends and share similar parenting techniques when it comes to raising kids with extreme wealth. Melinda said she vowed to raise her kids differently than those who attend universities where their parents' names are on a building, like the ones she went to school with at Duke University. "I vowed to myself that if I ever had resources at my disposal, those were not the kind of children I wanted to raise," she told the outlet.
Melinda explained that their kids did not just get anything they wanted because they could afford it. "They either had to buy with their allowance or put it on their wish list, that maybe they'd get it from their grandparents or us on their birthday or Christmas," she said.
She thought of Scott, who had "similar philosophies." And I have to say, again, MacKenzie was helpful to me in this. I could see a bit how she was parenting, and I knew we had quite similar philosophies, actually," she told The Times. "We were close-ish, not as close then, but I knew she was trying to raise her kids, literally just down the street from me, in essentially the same way," the 59-year-old said.
The friends would have more in common after Melinda's divorce, because two years earlier, Scott announced her separation from Bezos in a joint statement on January 9, 2019. They share three sons and one daughter they adopted from China, and have kept their lives away from the public.
After the divorce, Melinda dated journalist Jon Du PreScott in 2022 but it was revealed in April 2024 that they broke up. Mackenzie married Lakeside School science teacher Dan Jewett in 2021 but she filed for divorce in September 2022, which was finalized in January 2023
They've both donated money to philanthropic ventures, and Scott has donated more than $12 billion of the $40 billion she received after the divorce to a variety of nonprofits, per Kiplinger. Gates has pledged to donate $1 billion over the next two years to organizations supporting women and girls around the world and has been a political activist for gender and reproductive rights.