Bill Gates ranked higher than the Pope and the Dalai Lama as the world's most admired man in 2019.
Now the files Epstein kept on him are about to be read into the congressional record.
And what Epstein knew about him is what Congress wants exposed.
Gates Built a Machine to Make You Trust Him
Bill Gates wanted one thing from the public: trust.
He hired dozens of people and spent millions of dollars to manufacture it.
A styling team kept a custom-size mannequin to test his outfits for public engagements.
Troves of neutral-tone crew necks, V-necks, button-downs, and extra pairs of his signature glasses stored in an off-site building.
Three options submitted to senior staff for approval before every appearance.
The goal, according to current and former employees: make him look like Mister Rogers.
While the wardrobe team handled optics, two separate polling operations – one inside the Gates Foundation, one inside his private office, Gates Ventures – tracked public opinion on favorability, trustworthiness, and inspiration scores.
When he ranked number one in the world above the Pope, Gates Ventures CEO Larry Cohen fired off a celebratory email calling the result a reflection of the team's "hard work and creativity."
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Epstein had emails saved about Gates's extramarital affairs and the antibiotics Gates allegedly sought to secretly give his wife for an STD he gave her.
The Story Bill Gates Told About Epstein for Years Just Fell Apart
Every time a reporter asked, Gates gave the same answer.
Meetings were strictly philanthropic and the women were never present.
"Every meeting where I was with him were meetings with men," Gates told the Wall Street Journal in 2019. "I was never at any parties or anything like that."
The Justice Department files released in February contained more than 1,000 emails connecting back to Gates, the foundation, or people on his payroll.
The files show Gates posed for photographs with Epstein and the women around him.
Epstein flew Gates on his plane to meet the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize committee – while pitching Gates on a multibillion-dollar charity fund that would have paid Epstein millions in fees.
They show two of Gates's senior advisers exchanged hundreds of messages with Epstein through the year he died.
And they show that in 2017, Epstein emailed Gates demanding reimbursement for a Russian bridge player's coding school tuition – an implicit threat to expose the affair if Gates didn't keep cooperating.
Gates met with Epstein more than half a dozen times after Epstein's 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, bringing foundation executives into those meetings and telling the public every time that it was strictly about philanthropy.
At a February town hall with foundation employees – internally branded "BG Unplugged" – Gates admitted to two affairs with Russian women and said, "I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit."
His divorce proceedings had referenced more than 20 affairs.
One of those women worked at his nuclear energy company TerraPower from 2010 to 2012.
Her name was in TerraPower's internal system and she appeared in a 2011 magazine photo shoot with Gates at the company.
TerraPower's CEO told employees in a recorded all-hands meeting that the affairs "had nothing to do with TerraPower."
Employees privately told each other that was not true.
This Was Never About Sweaters
The image machine had one job: make you trust Bill Gates enough to let him run the world.
He funded the WHO while governments shut your church and your business following its guidance.
Your doctor told you the vaccines were mandatory – Gates helped make that happen.
Two years of empty classrooms for kids came with his fingerprints on the funding.
None of that works without a public that sees Gates and thinks Mister Rogers.
The mannequin wasn't vanity – it was the infrastructure of an influence operation built on one asset: your trust.
Epstein had to stay quiet because one scandal collapses the whole thing.
So Gates kept meeting a convicted sex offender year after year, kept lying about what those meetings were, and kept the image machine running like nothing was wrong.
Now the trust is gone – and so is everything built on top of it.
On June 10, Gates sits before the House Oversight Committee for a closed-door, off-video transcribed interview – conditions his team negotiated after successfully pushing the original date back by weeks.
Gates chose a Republican former Justice Department official as his lawyer, and a full communications team is preparing his answers.
None of it saved him from the files.
The question on June 10 is whether any of it saves him from Congress.
Sources:
- Emily Glazer, "Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It's Cracking," The Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2026.
- "Rep. Nancy Mace Demands Bill Gates Testify Under Oath On Relationship With Epstein," mace.house.gov, February 4, 2026.
- "Bill Gates Will Testify in the Epstein Probe," NPR, April 8, 2026.
- "Gates Foundation Investigating Its Ties to Epstein," Fortune, April 23, 2026.
