Bill Gates Admits Past Affair With Physicist After Microsoft Investigated Relationship With Female Employee

Bill Gates Admits Past Affair With Physicist After Microsoft Investigated Relationship With Female Employee

Bill Gates – Bill Gates affair – Bill Gates physicist relationship – Bill Gates recently confirmed he had two past affairs, with a bridge player and with a physicist — one personal and one professional, he said.

Reports of Gates’ romantic transgressions have grown in recent years, and his comments add new insight into his conduct.

The billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder admitted to the affairs during a town hall last week with employees of his eponymous charity, amid scrutiny of his previous relationship with disgraced financier and accused human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Gates, 70, apologized for having associated with Epstein, a convicted sex offender, while distancing himself from anything “illicit” related to the latter man.

A spokesperson for him told PEOPLE after the town hall, in part, that he “spoke candidly, addressing several questions in detail, and took responsibility for his actions.”

Gates’ connection with Epstein was thrust back into the spotlight with the release of documents by the U.S. Department of Justice that included years-old emails from Epstein to himself claiming Gates got a sexually transmitted infection from “Russian girls” and sought Epstein’s help in order to hide it from his then-wife.

Gates’ spokesperson has denied those claims. However, Gates said at the town hall, “I did have affairs, one with a Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events, and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities.”

Epstein knew of those relationships, Gates said.

“It was a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein,” he said while insisting, “To be clear I never spent any time with victims, the women around him.”

“I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” he said.

Separately, he said in an Australian news interview last month that he had been seeking charitable donations from Epstein’s circle.

Bill Gates (left) and Jeffrey Epstein.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty; Neil Rasmus/Patrick McMullan/Getty

It appears the bridge player whom Gates knew is Mila Antonova, who was identified by The Wall Street Journal in 2023 and reportedly met Gates around 2010 when she was in her 20s.

Antonova did not comment to the Journal about Gates at the time she was first named. PEOPLE could not reach her for comment for this story.

Less is known about the physicist with whom Gates said he had an affair beyond an indication that they shared a work connection.

Microsoft investigated a claim originating in 2019 that Gates “sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee” in 2000, PEOPLE previously reported.

Gates left Microsoft’s board in 2020.

A spokesperson for him said at the time that he’d had “an affair almost 20 years ago” with an unnamed woman “which ended amicably” and maintained that him stepping down from the board “was in no way related to this matter.”

The Journal reported otherwise: that the employee’s accusation led to him leaving. The paper identified the employee only as an engineer.

His ex-wife, philanthropist Melinda French Gates, has sparingly addressed his past infidelity in public and in a memoir, 2025’s The Next Day.

More recently, she has said he and other men known to spend time with Epstein must “answer” for that.

“Both partners have to be honest with one another,” she said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in April 2025.

“If you can’t, you can’t have intimacy and you can’t have trust,” Melinda said then of her relationship with Bill. “So in the end, I had to go.”

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