Tech billionaire addresses House Oversight panel, calling meetings a “grave error” and revealing blackmail attempts.
WASHINGTON — Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has directly addressed his past relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, calling their meetings a “grave error in judgment” during testimony before a U.S. House Oversight panel.
The public reckoning follows a recent wave of Department of Justice document releases that pulled back the curtain on Epstein’s inner circle. Confronting the panel, Gates admitted that Epstein attempted to weaponize knowledge of Gates’s private extramarital affairs in an effort to blackmail and pressure the tech billionaire into maintaining their association.
“Every minute I spent with him, I regret,” Gates stated, offering an apology for the association. “I never witnessed nor had any indication that Epstein was engaged in ongoing criminal conduct. Epstein used the affairs against him to pressure me to re-engage with him. He was unsuccessful in this effort.”
The Multi-Billion Dollar Pitch and the Pivot to Extortion
According to congressional testimony and newly unsealed correspondence, the relationship between Gates and Epstein began around 2011, years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates maintained that his interactions were strictly transactional, designed to explore a massive global health charitable fund that Epstein claimed he could source through his connections with Wall Street billionaires.
However, when Gates refused to move forward with the joint multi-billion dollar philanthropic initiative, the dynamic shifted from financial pitching to targeted coercion.
Internal documents reveal that Epstein held detailed, cryptic notes regarding Gates’s extramarital indiscretions, specifically highlighting personal relationships with a Russian bridge player, Mila Antonova, and a Russian nuclear physicist. When the fundraising partnership collapsed, Epstein attempted to extort Gates by threatening to expose the infidelity. In one 2017 email exchange, Epstein sharply demanded that Gates reimburse him for tuition costs he had previously covered for Antonova’s software coding camp, a message Gates’s team recognized as a thinly veiled threat that the affair would be made public if Gates cut ties entirely.
Foundation Fallout and Damage Control
The fallout from the latest Justice Department disclosure has reverberated through Gates’s professional and philanthropic network. Prior to his congressional appearance, Gates held a candid, tense town hall meeting with employees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to apologize directly to his staff.
“I apologize to other people who are drawn into this because of the mistake that I made,” Gates told foundation employees, acknowledging that the association was “the opposite of the values of the Foundation.”
The reputational damage has already impacted Gates’s public schedule, forcing the billionaire to cancel a highly anticipated keynote address at an Artificial Intelligence summit in India to keep the controversy from overshadowing the event.
While the unsealed files included heavily redacted photographs of Gates alongside various women, whom Gates clarified were merely Epstein’s administrative assistants, the Oversight panel emphasized that Gates has cooperated fully with the ongoing investigation. Lawmakers clarified that the primary objective of the inquiry remains mapping out Epstein’s broad network of high-society contacts rather than leveling criminal allegations against Gates himself.
