Microsoft founder Bill Gates viewed Jeffrey Epstein as an enigmatic figure with inexplicable wealth but met with him over a dozen times in a bid to collect sweeping donations for global health, according to his testimony to Congress.
Gates testified on his relationship with Epstein on June 10 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A transcript of the Microsoft founder’s interview was released Tuesday, offering a rare glimpse into what he saw of the now-deceased New York financier’s identity, interests, and connections to powerful figures.
“The whole Epstein thing was confusing to me,” he told lawmakers. “What was Epstein’s thing? How did he make money? What was his — what was he trying to do? To this day, I don’t find a fully satisfactory explanation of, you know, how he got his wealth, and a variety of things.”
Gates said that between January 2011 and December 2014, he met with Epstein “12 to 14 times, plus two Skype calls,” to discuss how the New Yorker could use his connections to wealthy people to raise billions for global health. Gates said Epstein told him he was an adviser to “Wall Street billionaires and Middle East billionaires” and provided tax counsel and advice on wills to those people. Epstein suggested he could raise billions for causes such as The Global Fund and Global Alliance for Vaccines, both of which are closely linked to the former Microsoft CEO, by advising those wealthy people to give philanthropically, in “a context where he could suggest to them that that money could have a very powerful effect if it was dedicated to global health,” according to Gates.
Through it all, Gates said he thought Epstein was an “unusual” and “unique” person, and wondered how he acquired his money. During their relationship, Epstein was “pretty vague about specific names” of billionaires he knew, and when he did arrange meetings with Gates and wealthy people in the final months of their relationship, the encounters proved to be “dead-end” opportunities, the former Microsoft CEO told lawmakers, noting he ended the relationship after a final meeting in December of 2014.
“You know, I’m still not sure to this day if he sincerely thought that, in fact, billions would appear that would be dedicated to global health,” Gates said. “I think so, because, you know, there were meetings talking about literally the structure of donor-advised funds that might be attractive to the donors.”
The Microsoft founder detailed what he saw of Epstein’s personality and interests during the hearing, describing him as a “dilettante.” Gates said he did not ever see any evidence that Epstein might have been a foreign asset and asserted that he never saw Epstein engage in sexual contact of any kind, but noted that “almost every time I saw Epstein, he either had one or two what appeared to be admin assistants with him.”
“They were all women,” Gates said. “They all appeared to be adult women.”
“He’s kind of a unique person, even, you know, based on the limited knowledge I had at the time,” he added. “It was kind of a unique thing to have this large house in Manhattan and to mention quite a wide range of people from both business and academic areas. I would say, you know, I thought he was unusual. He had thoughts about economics. He had thoughts about psychology, you know, various macroeconomic things. … He mentioned a number of people, you know, professors at universities, that he would talk to about varying scientific things. … He appeared to be a dilettante who, you know, would talk to lots of people in different fields.”
Gates first met Epstein in January 2011. That encounter was arranged by Dr. Boris Nikolic, Gates’s “valuable” science adviser, who was named in Epstein’s final will and testament. Gates told lawmakers it surprised him “a lot” to learn Nikolic was in Epstein’s will.
It was not until the fall of 2014 that Epstein first arranged meetings with possible global health donors, a move triggered when Melinda Gates expressed sweeping reservations about the New York financier and pressed her then-husband to end the relationship.
“Then I was very hardcore, ‘Jeffrey, OK, who are these people? Let’s meet with them.’ And there’s a lot of delay, but eventually that results in the September 2014 meeting,” Gates reflected. “He had me meet with people who … were very polite, you know, praising the work I was doing in global health, but they clearly — none of them was at a point where they were deciding to give large additional sums in general and not to global health.
“It was a complete disappointment from my point of view.”
He said Epstein did “many things to try and deepen the relationship,” including several social invitations, which, Gates said, he rejected, preferring to keep the relationship strictly professional.
Gates named former Harvard University President Larry Summers; former Barclays CEO Jes Staley; Leon Black and Josh Harris, the co-founders of private equity behemoth Apollo Global Management; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; and billionaire investor Tom Pritzker as people who were possible global health donors who had meetings with him and Epstein.
In another meeting, Gates and Epstein met with Kathy Ruemmler, who was serving as White House counsel to then-President Barack Obama, to talk politics, according to the former Microsoft CEO.
“I think it was more talking about what was going on politically,” Gates remembered. “You know, he may have been working towards suggesting I involve her in some of my work in some way, but that never happened. … It would have talked about political things, but this is during the Obama presidency.”
During his congressional testimony, Gates was pressed on one email from the Epstein files, which asked if “JE want to meet to follow up with … and like to come join JE’s meeting with Barak slash Bill Gates.” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-VA) asked if “Barak” referred to Obama or former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Gates replied, “I never met any Baraks in connection with Epstein. There were no Baraks whose names were mentioned, or that I met with.”
Though he harbored reservations about Epstein’s enigmatic persona, Gates told lawmakers he believed the New York financier’s promises of raising billions for global health were credible.
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“I didn’t really choose him,” Gates said. “He’s the only one who ever came to me and said that he could raise billions or tens of billions of dollars for global health. For people who are very rich, hopefully, they think of a large sum being available for philanthropy. And it was because of his purported relationship with billionaires, or he was part of that tax and will discussion, that it seemed credible to me that he might be able to raise or be a referral to help raise billions of dollars for global health.
“When somebody is, you know, thinking about their will and their taxes, you know, that’s when they really think, ‘OK, I have,’ particularly people of great wealth, ’that I have money that’s leftover that perhaps I should give philanthropically.’ And so I believed, and he represented, that with a number of billionaires, including Wall Street billionaires and Middle East billionaires, he had that type of relationship where there was somebody staking out their overall estate plan. And he specifically said this to me, which, of course, ended up not happening, but he said that we could raise billions.”