A Chinese interpreter who worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has come forward to refute crazy online claims that she was to blame for the Microsoft founder's separation from his wife of 27 years. Zhe 'Shelly' Wang, 36, slammed the unfounded rumors that she had an affair with Bill Gates in a post on Weibo, the Chinese social media.
Who is the rumored reason for Bill and Melinda Gates' divorce?
Wang, who is unmarried and lives in Seattle, is a skilled professional interpreter who has worked with the Gates Foundation, Yale School of Management, and Harvard Business School. Bill Gates, who is worth $130 billion, and Melinda Gates revealed their divorce in a joint statement on Monday, but the lack of clarification has fueled speculation.
Other than images she has shared online of her translating engagements with the Gates Foundation, it is unknown what contributed to Wang being a subject of gossip. Still, the exaggeration spread like wildfire on Chinese social media. Wang's friend Li Donglei was taken aback by the rumors and wrote a blog post defending her.
Wang was born in the Chinese port city of Guangzhou and later immigrated to the United States, according to Li. Her LinkedIn page, which has since been removed, said she owned the Four Seasons Hot Pot & Dumplings in Provo, Utah from 2006 to 2008, Daily Mail reported.
Wang earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business/Managerial Economics from Brigham Young University in 2007. She studied Conference Interpretation at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and later worked as an interpreter for the institute in September 2012. She is fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English.
She worked on several TED Conference activities while at the Monterey Institute and then went on to work with TED Conferences, where she managed a team of interpreters. Her job with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seemed to have been on a freelance basis.
Why can't China stop talking about the Bill and Melinda Gates divorce?
According to CNN Business, the Bill and Melinda Gates divorce has sent shockwaves across China, where shocked fans of the philanthropic couple took to social media to mourn the breakup. The "Bill Gates' divorce" hashtag on Weibo had received more than 830 million views, and at least 66,000 discussion messages since the news broke, surpassing the 91 million views received when Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Scott divorced in 2019, according to the outlet.
For the past few days, Weibo users have been speculating about how the pair will divide their vast wealth and whether the divorce will affect the couple's powerful philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Although Bill Gates is no longer the CEO of Microsoft, his company has spent decades cultivating ties with Beijing, where the tech giant's Western goods are still permitted while others, such as Facebook and Google, are not.
Per New York Post, Bill Gates has 4.1 million Weibo followers, almost quadruple that of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple CEO Tim Cook, demonstrating his success. On Weibo, Kai-fu Lee, a prominent Chinese tech figure who previously served as the head of Google China and assisted in establishing the Microsoft Research Lab Asia, expressed his surprise at the report. After 27 years of marriage, the pair declared their divorce in a joint statement on Monday. Melinda Gates applied for divorce later, writing in legal documents that the union was irretrievably broken.
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