Melinda Gates Reportedly Has New Boyfriend, First Since Bill Gates Split

Melinda Gates is reportedly dating former Fox News correspondent Jon Du Pre in her first romance since splitting from her ex-husband Bill Gates. TMZ reported on the relationship on Wednesday, but it’s not clear exactly how long it’s been going on. The two have been photographed together at public events going back to at least April.

Sources close to the couple say that Melinda and Du Pre have been dating for at least a few months. They were spotted at an NBA game together back in April, and they reportedly booked a large hotel block in Newport Beach for a family gathering not too long ago. Du Pre is 63 years old and has worked as a communications specialist, a broadcast producer and more. He is the author of a family memoir called The Prodigal Father: A True Story of Tragedy, Survival, and Reconciliation in an American Family.

Du Pre was on air on Fox News in the late 1990s and early 2000s, so modern viewers likely wouldn’t recognize him. He was previously married and has three children, two of whom graduated from the Mormon university BYU.

So far, Melinda and Du Pre have not commented publicly on the rumors of their romance. Melinda was married to Microsoft founder Bill Gates from 1994 until 2021. She is an accomplished computer scientist who got a job with Microsoft shortly after graduating from Duke University. She began dating Bill around the same time, and shortly after their marriage, she left the company to focus on starting a family.

For the two decades that followed, Melinda put most of her energy into The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which worked on a number of charitable causes including the implementation of cutting-edge medicine around the world. She also published a book in 2019 called The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World.

Melinda and Bill Gates announced their divorce in May of 2021, but according to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Melinda had met with divorce lawyers as early as October of 2019. That report claimed that Melinda was concerned about her husband’s business dealings with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and that it was one of the leading catalysts of their divorce.

The divorce was fast and amicable, settled in August of 2021. Rather than a spousal support arrangement, the couple agreed to terms where Bill transferred a hefty sum to Melinda in the form of shares and stocks. The status of their relationship remains a matter of much speculation. Bill has not publicly commented on the reports of Melinda’s new romance.