Melinda French Gates knew that she needed to end her marriage to Bill Gates — and it was a powerful dream that gave her the final push.
In a new interview with entrepreneur Jamie Kern Lima, French Gates opens up about the dream that helped her find the clarity and courage to walk away from the billionaire Microsoft co-founder.
“You say an article had come out suggesting your ex-husband not only went against the marriage, but also your values, and you started having dreams of a crumbling foundation,” Kern Lima said in an interview released on Thursday as she asked French Gates to share more about those dreams.
“I have a very rich dream life, and I have for a long time,” French Gates said. “Some dreams will take me years to understand, but if they’re recurring, I know I need to pay attention to them.”
French Gates’ comments start at the 33-minute mark in the video below.
“This dream, as I say in the book, doesn’t really take Freud to figure it out,” she said with a laugh, adding that after “certain things came out publicly,” she “had this dream that I was on a cliff.”
“My ex-husband Bill and the kids were also on the edge of the cliff, but my part of the cliff crumbled away,” she said. “And I was dropping down into a pit and they were still on the edge of this cliff together, and they were safe ― so I wasn’t worried about my children.”
“But I knew when I woke up, ‘Oh, this means I need to separate and do something else,’” the philanthropist explained. “I need to figure this out, and I’m going to be alone in figuring this out.”
French Gates eventually asked the Microsoft co-founder for a divorce, which she called “unbelievably painful” in a 2022 interview with Fortune magazine.
Their split was finalized in 2021.
Bill Gates has since called his divorce “the mistake I most regret.”
“You would have to put that at the top of the list,” the businessman said in an interview with the U.K.’s Times in January. “There are others, but none that matter. The divorce thing was miserable for me and Melinda for at least two years.”