Let’s start with Gates. The until-recently richest man in the world has consistently downplayed his ties to Epstein, telling one reporter, “I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.” But Gates is among the tech billionaires with the most extensive disclosed ties to Epstein.
Whether Epstein and Gates did have a “business relationship” has been disputed. Gates did make a $2 million donation to the Media Lab in 2014. And Ronan Farrow reported in the New Yorker that Epstein was credited with securing the Gates money, with internal records saying that Epstein had “directed” the gift or that it was made at his instruction.
“Gates is making this gift at the recommendation of a friend of his who wishes to remain anonymous,” the record read.
Gates’s aides denied Epstein’s direction of the gift. But if he did, as Farrow reported he did, it raises the possibility that Gates was somehow complicit in the image rehabilitation of Epstein and part of an unseemly cover-up.
But MIT investigators did little to help establish truth and fiction in the situation.
“In 2014, Epstein claimed to have arranged for Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates to provide an anonymous $2 million donation to the Media Lab,” MIT’s lawyers wrote in the 63-page report. “Representatives of Bill Gates have told us that Gates flatly denies that Epstein had anything to do with Gates’s donation.”
This, suffice it to say, skirts the question of who is telling the truth — and effectively leaves it as an unresolved he said, she said.
When Recode asked the lawyers involved in the report if this sidestep was intentional, they would only say that “we didn’t see any evidence” that Gates or any Gates entity “were donating money from Mr. Epstein or that they were donating money at the behest of Mr. Epstein.” They used similar language — “there is no evidence” — to respond to the notion that Gates acted to “launder” Epstein’s money by donating money that didn’t belong to the Microsoft founder.
In the report, MIT’s investigators do not definitively say it did not happen — just that they didn’t see any evidence of it. And that statement would then have to be reconciled with MIT’s internal records, which offer at least some evidence to the contrary.
While there are many reasons to doubt the credibility of Epstein and of Joi Ito, the ousted head of the MIT Media Lab, there are also reasons why Gates and his denial should be scrutinized.
Despite Gates’s public comments minimizing his ties to Epstein, the New York Times uncovered numerous instances of the two meeting privately, to say nothing of Gates’s underlings. At one point, Gates told colleagues that the lifestyle of Epstein, who at that point was already a convicted sex offender, was “intriguing.” (A spokesperson told the Times the comment had nothing to do with Epstein’s lurid past.)
“Bill Gates regrets ever meeting with Epstein and recognizes it was an error in judgment to do so,” a Gates spokesperson told the paper this fall.