Bill hires Warren Buffett’s 97-year-old lawyer pal in $130 billion split from Melinda: Gates enlists help of ‘the broadest thinker he’s ever encountered’ as it’s revealed there’s no prenup and 27-year marriage is ‘irretrievably broken’
- Bill Gates, 65, announced on Twitter on Monday that he and his 56-year-old wife Melinda are divorcing
- He has hired Charles T. Munger, a 97-year-old L.A.-based business lawyer and philanthropist
- Both of them worked at Berkshire Hathaway; Gates served on the board until May 2020, Munger is a VP there
- Melinda described her marriage as ‘irretrievably broken’ in a divorce petition viewed by DailyMail.com
- The petition revealed the couple did not sign a prenuptial agreement when they wed in 1994
- Gates was already a billionaire; he founded Microsoft in 1975 and made his first billion in 1987
- Since then they amassed a combined net worth of $130billion and raised three children together
- Their eldest daughter Jennifer, 25, responded to the news on Instagram and revealed the family has been going through a ‘challenging stretch of time’
Bill Gates has hired a lawyer who serves as right-hand man to his billionaire friend Warren Buffett to oversee his divorce from wife Melinda, as the couple become one of the wealthiest ever to split.
Charles T Munger, of Los Angeles-based firm Munger Tolles & Olson, is listed as one of the three attorneys representing Bill in divorce papers filed by Melinda in Washington state on Monday.
Munger, 97 and himself a billionaire, is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company run by Buffett – who is a long-time friend of Gates and the world’s sixth richest man. He also sits on the board of Costco and is the chairman of Daily Journal Corp., a publishing conglomerate which owns local newspapers in California.
Gates served on the board of Berkshire Hathaway from 2004 until 2020, when he also walked away from Microsoft to focus more on philanthropy.
Munger is not a family lawyer. His expertise is in business and real estate law. He also attended Harvard – as did Bill (who dropped out in the 70s to pursue Microsoft) after a stint as a meteorologist in the Second World War.
Both Gates and Buffett have heaped high praise on him. Gates previously described him as the ‘broadest thinker he has ever met’. Buffett said of him in the same 2017 Farnam Street interview: ‘He comes equipped for rationality… I would say that to try and typecast Charlie in terms of any other human that I can think of, no one would fit. He’s got his own mold.’
Bill, 64, and Melinda, 56, were married for 27 years before announcing their split this week – with papers filed by Melinda saying the marriage is ‘irretrievably broken’.
