Bill Gates made one decision worse than Clippy

by philg

Happy National Paperclip Day (apparently popular in the Florida Free State; see this Orlando Sentinel article).

Until recently, as far as anyone knew, the worse decision that Bill Gates ever made was to launch Clippy.

Now we find out that Gates has a family court plaintiff who will be harvesting roughly half of what he earned prior to encountering her.

Consider that Bill Gates beat Xerox and Apple in the desktop computing market. He triumphed over IBM and its technologically superior OS/2 in operating systems. He defeated the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark antitrust case (ran out the clock until George W. Bush took over!). He escaped the Internal Revenue Service and taxation by stuffing every share of stock that he wanted to sell into the Gates Foundation where it could be sold without attracting capital gains tax.

The one enemy that he couldn’t defend against or prevail over was his family court plaintiff.

(What if he’d stayed single, but periodically had sex with cash-motivated individuals seeking to make bank via pregnancy and child support? Washington State family law makes it tough for a plaintiff to obtain more than about $400,000 over 18 years. Suppose that Gates’s current plaintiff collects $60 billion. That would have been sufficient to fund 150,000 child support plaintiffs at the top of the Washington State child support guidelines. Maybe some of them could have moved to Massachusetts or California or Arkansas prior to giving birth and availed themselves of unlimited child support, as Hunter Biden’s plaintiff did (sex in D.C.; lawsuit in Arkansas). But “unlimited” doesn’t necessarily mean that sex partners would have been paid anywhere near $60 billion.

What if the Melinda entanglement was more about sex than procreation? If Melinda took advice from Betsy Salkind (“Men are like linoleum floors. Lay ’em right and you can walk all over them for thirty years.”), there would have been a short period of evening excitement followed by decades of deep freeze. A friend who is “familiar” (as the journalists say) with the rates charged by legal escorts in London and Germany says that the maximum that Bill Gates could possibly have paid for the highest-end all-night companionship is $2000 per woman per evening (London rates; substantially cheaper in Germany). A $60 billion fee to an American plaintiff would translate into 30 million evenings of top-class escort service in London or 82,192 years of every-evening companionship with one woman (more than 40,000 years of every-evening companionship with two women). The same friend says that Jeff Bezos’s situation breaks his heart. “He was the richest guy in the world. What is he doing with a 50-year-old who already had kids with two different men?”)

Maybe the most helpful thing to say to someone considering marriage to a less-wealthy lower-earning potential future plaintiff: “Do you think that you’re smarter than Bill Gates?”

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22 thoughts on “Bill Gates made one decision worse than Clippy”

  2. It is increasingly clear that Melinda is a feminist, and she married Bill for the money. She complains about sexual harassment in the workplace!

    I doubt that she will get $60B, but she is getting a few billion.

    Clippy wasn’t a failure. It probably made money for Microsoft.

  4. Is getting a vasectomy now something that is not done? Someone in his position should have seriously considered it.

  5. Marriage is like a Tornado: “In the beginning there’s a lot of blowing and sucking, Then you lose your house”.

    “The only people who remain married are those who aren’t worth divorcing”

    Tech Lead makes some good points about Melinda Gates:

    • Tech vlogger makes great point about the power struggle between two narcissists.

  6. Why is this surprising that adulterers are served divorces after their adulteries become public? Concept of marriage is derived from religion, idea of soul-mates created by God who meant husband and wife to each other or at least a union of a man and a woman who want to fulfill God commandments.
    From want I gathered from scraps of news about Bill Gates that I did not have time to shut my eyes and plug my years on he was not particularly religious or at all religious person.
    I doubt that Ms. Gates was constrained in her finances in the marriage and more likely guided large joint “philanthropy” of Gates foundation which now will be divided. I do not think it is financial. I think it is “keep up with the Allens” thing, when socialites will attach stigma to known unfaithful marriage.

    • LSI: Why does the word “adulterer” make sense in the U.S. where (a) marriage is not religious, (b) marriage is not permanent (can be terminated at any time by one spouse unilaterally), (c) there is no expectation that the parties in what is called a “marriage” will have sex with each other, and (d) adultery is not a crime that can be prosecuted or even complained about in the “no-fault” family courts (“I want to spend more time having sex with the neighbors” is as good a reason to give a judge as any other, but the judge is unlikely to ask for a plaintiff for a reason).

      I agree with you that the “concept of marriage” from, say, 1000 years ago, has a religious component. But the fact that we’re using the word “marriage” doesn’t mean that the concept has been preserved in any sense. From the state’s point of view, and from the perspective of Americans who aren’t religious, a “marriage” may merely be something that confers the right to sue for property division and alimony via divorce.

      Let me give you a thought experiment. Kevin Spacey, then 56 years old, was supposedly engaged in some kind of sexual activity with William Little, then 18 (sex in 2016; accusation that it wasn’t consensual in 2018). Suppose that instead of paying off this accuser, Kevin Spacey had celebrated a beautiful marriage with Mr. Little under Maskachusetts law. After two years, the honeymoon was literally over. Mr. Little, now a 20-year-old, decided that he didn’t want to have sex with a 58-year-old anymore. If Mr. Spacey had sought out companionship in the nearest bathhouse, would that be “adultery” in violation of God’s commandments?

      If we wouldn’t call Mr. Spacey an “adulterer” after being frozen out of the bedroom in our no-religion no-fault-divorce system of “marriage”, why would the shortest reasonable description of Bill Gates be “adulterer”?

    • Philip, a) is not true, at least not for a large group of people among those who bother to marry, c) is certainly not true for me or for a large group of people, b) is true and is ridiculous and negates meaning of marriage and so is part of d) where adultery is not a valid reason for divorce under US law, sure it is valid under rules of marriage and of Church. Not clear why you brought Kevin Spacey up and whether he is married or not, I assume not since no divorce proceeding was announced. His actions do not fall under adultery classification as adultery assumes current and valid marriage but are under other categories of sins.
      By the way, notion of adultery was less strict 1000 years ago, now religions extended notion of adultery to more cases of out of wedlock sex.
      As I sad, having marriage outside of religion makes little sense, civil marriage is a fig leaf and no wonder that people treat it as such.
      They treat it as a power and business exercise that allows for tricks that strengthen individual position, I am sure Mr Gates not a stranger to this.
      “Civil” “marriage” was meant to be a power grab exercise by the state, why otherwise it would duplicate church duties?

    • So you are saying that Melinda wanted her rich friends to know that Bill is not good enough for her.

      Bill remains one of the richest, highest status, and most respected men on Earth. If he is not good enough to keep a wife, what hope do the rest of us have?

    • Roger: And don’t forget that Bill has been trying to heal all of humanity for the past 20 years and, more recently, all of Planet Earth (with his climate change book). He is like Mother Teresa if Mother Teresa had owned a Gulfstream.

    • As noted, Bill Gates was not religious, and civil law does not enforce religious expectations. Melinda was supposed to be Catholic, but if she really believed in Catholic marriage then she would not be suing for divorce.

      She was renting out her vagina for a few billion dollars. Now she is collecting her billions, and squandering it on foolish feminist causes.

    • Roger, it is not that simple since Ms. French suffered in the marriage fro around two decades before dropping off. I believe it is highly suspicious that it came after Epstein association – induced revelation of Mr. Gates’ live on a side that also brought to focus other older Mr. Gates’ frivolities.
      And I think it is right not to be in the sham marriage.
      I believe that sham marriage is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton had little change becoming of president. Anyway, everyone lampooned Bill Clinton’s sham marriage – why Bill Gates shame marriage is different? Maybe it was not a sham marriage for Mr. gates but recent revelation created an appearance of such. Maybe it was such for Ms. Gates.
      Of course, since the USA is a great country Ms. Gates is making out with a great prize. Only in America.
      What chance do we have of lasting sham “civil” marriage in the USA? Only till it is advantageous to each of the engaged parties.

    • @Roger “renting out her vagina”

      Prolly worked more than her pu$$y to bag and tag a billionaire CEO.

    • Melinda suffered for two decades??! She lived in a $100 million house. She had funding for all of her projects. It appears that she was not taking care of her husband’s sexual needs. Yes, she appears to be like Hillary Clinton in that respect. Melinda and Hillary are two of the most privileged and entitled women on Earth. They owe it all to their husbands. They would be nothing otherwise. And yet they are the most ungrateful women on Earth.

  7. I really get the feeling that this divorce has less to do with any philandering on Gates’ part (maybe a factor) but more to do with “philanthropic” disagreements. On the day this story broke, one commentator on NPR was already counting the money and his opinion was that Melinda would be much more “liberal” with her philanthropy and Billg, who he thought would be more “conservative.”

    I think the best speech Bill Gates ever gave was here:

    https://youtu.be/x5lZIGhShYg?t=245

    And my gut sense here is that the two of them have a major disagreement about how Wokely to give away the billions and that became an irreconcilable difference, so rather than fight it out in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the tabloids, they went splitsville.

  8. Bill and Melinda get divorced, Boris Johnson gets married to Carrie Symonds (his third wife, blonde and barefoot!) in super-secret, no-mask fashion that can only be revealed through the tabloids. Even top aides were “completely in the dark” but the Sun was Over Top Secret!

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/15108452/boris-johnson-marries-carrie-symonds-westminster/

    Meanwhile in NYC in Mayor de Blasio’s Progressive Paradise, the Washington Square Park “drug den” horrifies even the most jaded Village People:

    https://nypost.com/2021/05/29/washington-square-park-drug-den-horrifies-greenwich-village/

    “Another crack dealer, Tony from the Bronx, nearly emaciated and sporting a North Face stocking cap even on the warm May evening, hawked “eight-balls” [an eighth of ounce] of cocaine for $350, and as much crack as we wanted. He also offered to sell the pipe needed to smoke the rocks of cocaine right there on a park bench.”

    “The last few weeks have been hell,” said Diane Nardone, president of the board at 11 Fifth Avenue, a 20-story co-op steps from the park, citing the late-night raves with banned amplified music that echoes across the neighborhood. Wheeled vehicles, including bicycles, are officially banned, but gas-fueled motorbikes have run freely across the park’s pedestrian footpaths most evenings.”

    “Drug enforcement across the city has all but disappeared during the de Blasio administration. New York City reported just 5,372 drug arrests last year, by far the lowest on record. The decline is largely connected to the 2019 decriminalization of pot and last month’s legalization of weed, but not entirely. The number of drug arrests have declined every year under the de Blasio regime. There were nearly 20,000 drug arrests in 2013, the year before de Blasio took office, and more than 38,000 in 2000, under Mayor Giuliani.”

  9. Happy Memorial Day everyone. If you are in MA, mask or no mask, you are stuck inside this Memorial Day long weekend — thanks to mother nature and NE weather!

    Women are emotional, gossipers, they don’t see the big picture and tend to see the grass is always greener on the other side. As a result, they tend to jump ship and more often end up being sorry for doing after the fact. Even when they know deep down that they made the wrong decision, they will not admit it.

    Could Bill Gates or anyone else have been better prepared or made a better decision? I think not. This is a risk we all take, men and women, and hope for the best. However, it is women who are the divorce initiator more often than men.

    Sorry if I offended our ladies readers, if so, I would like to hear from them.

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