Bill Gates was seen cheering on team USA at the women’s Olympic gymnastics as a new book detailing his links to Jeffery Epstein came to light.
The Microsoft founder, 68, was seen sporting a black t-shirt and holding a navy and red USA baseball cap as he intently watched the artistic gymnastics women’s team final during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on Tuesday.
Simone Biles and Sunisa Lee led Team USA to its first Olympic gold in artistic gymnastics since 2016 as the Americans easily beat their rivals.
In the new biography, Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World, New York Times journalist Anupreeta Das writes that Gates was at one point the ‘brightest star’ in Epstein’s orbit but became a target for the late pedophile after their short-lived partnership collapsed.
Epstein had set his sights on Gates in 2010 when he and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett launched The Giving Pledge, a charitable campaign under which they vowed to donate 99 percent of their wealth.
To Epstein, their charitable initiative was a potential new ‘way to make money’ and restore his public image, according to the book.
It would allow Epstein to launder his reputation after his 2008 conviction for procuring underaged girls saw him serve a brief stint in jail and made him a registered sex offender, the book claims.
In the tome, set to be released August 13, Das writes that Epstein then began to ‘tunnel his way into Gates’s orbit’ with spectacular results.
The two men became friends as they worked on a health fund for billionaires with Gates even calling Epstein ‘my buddy’.
Epstein’s outrageous lifestyle was an ‘adventure’ for nerdy and married Gates, Das writes.
Emails between the two men even referred to Gates visiting one of Epstein’s homes for ‘Big Macs’, which some took to mean young girls.
Gates denies most of the accusations in the book, saying Das relied ‘almost exclusively on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources’.
In a statement to DailyMail.com, a spokesperson for Gates added: ‘The book includes highly sensationalized allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts our office provided to the author on numerous occasions.
‘Mr. Gates has previously stated his deep regret for ever meeting with Epstein, who he met with for discussions regarding philanthropy only’.
But Das’s book puts a fresh spotlight on his relationship with Epstein, which is seen as having cost him his marriage to Melinda French Gates. The couple split in 2021.
Melinda only met Epstein once in 2013 and told her then husband he was ‘evil personified’ — but Gates inexplicably carried on seeing him anyway.
While the world saw the Giving Pledge in 2010 as an extraordinary gesture by the world’s two richest men, Epstein just saw another lucrative opportunity.
Das, 46, writes that Epstein saw that much of Buffett’s money would be distributed through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and ‘began to tunnel a way into (Gates’s) orbit’.
By August 2010, 40 billionaires had signed up to the Giving Pledge and many turned to Gates for advice about how to give away their money.
They did not have experience setting up their own foundations yet Gates did.
As a result, Das writes: ‘Of all the stars that studded Epstein’s dark universe, Gates was the brightest’.
Their first meeting was in the summer of 2011 after Epstein pitched Gates a health-based fund for billionaires.
As the talks progressed, Epstein roped in JP Morgan to manage a ‘very high profile’ group of donors each worth at least $100million.
Reports at the time said that Gates flew on Epstein’s plane and had at least six meetings with him including dinners at the pedophile’s New York townhouse.
Gates told a colleague in 2011 that Epstein’s ‘lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me’.
One Epstein victim, a Polish model, met Gates at his Microsoft office in Seattle and even posed for a photo with him.
The woman, who was in her 20s at the time, has said that she recalled people looking at her as if to ask: ‘What is she doing there?’
According to Das, Epstein was an ‘adventure’ for Gates and referred to him at least one time as ‘my buddy’.
In an ominous passage, Das writes that Gates ‘chose not to listen’ to warnings about Epstein as the pedophile ‘could offer him something that was worth putting (his) image risk aside for’.
Epstein spent months trying to get the fund off the ground but in the end it came to nothing.
The last known contact between Gates and Epstein was in 2014 and their friendship would have likely not become public had Epstein not been arrested in 2019.
One of the most embarrassing episodes to come out of Gates’s friendship with Epstein was his affair with Mila Antonova, a Russian who he met at a bridge tournament.
Epstein also met Antonova, paid for her to attend a software coding course, and let her stay at one of his apartments in New York.
Reports have claimed that in 2017, Epstein emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the course.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the ‘tone of the message was that Epstein knew about the affair and could expose it’ in apparent retribution for not taking part in his health fund.
In the book, Das faults the ‘Gates media machine’ for its handling of the crisis.
On Tuesday, Gates and his philanthropist girlfriend Paula Hurd- the former wife of the former CEO of Oracle, Mark Hurd- watched as the Americans celebrated their gold medal by grabbing an American flag, jumping up and down, and taking time to pose for photos with fans.
The team rushed onto the floor and couldn’t contain their excitement as they moved to various points on the podium to give fans a chance to see them.
With Biles at her show-stopping best, the Americans’ total of 171.296 was well clear of Italy and Brazil and the exclamation point of a yearlong run in which Biles has cemented her legacy as the greatest ever in her sport, and among the best in the history of the Olympics.
The outcome — the Americans on top with the rest of the world looking up — was not in doubt from the moment Jordan Chiles began the night by drilling her double-twisting Yurchenko vault.