Tech billionaire Peter Thiel floated a conspiracy theory about Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged involvement with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation during his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience.
The former PayPal CEO told the host that he had developed his own theory about why the Microsoft founder created the nonprofit to fight poverty in 2000.
Rumors have been swirling since the couple divorced in 2021. Melinda reportedly received $76 billion in the settlement before leaving the Foundation in June with a settlement worth $12.5 billion.
Peter Thiel told Joe Rogan on an episode of the show that aired this week that he believed the Foundation itself was a ploy suggested by disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein rather than a prenuptial agreement that allowed Bill Gates to prevent his wife from receiving more in the divorce.
“My straight-up alternative conspiracy theory is… Bill and Melinda get married in 1994, they don’t sign a prenuptial agreement and something goes wrong with the marriage and maybe Melinda can get half the money in a divorce. He doesn’t want her to get half the money. And what do you do?” she said on the show.
‘The backup plan is something like: you pledge the marital assets to this nonprofit and that sort of forces Melinda to not complain about the marriage for a long, long time… so there’s something about the left-wing philanthropy world that was kind of a way for Baby Boomers to control their crazy wives, or something.’
Bill and Melinda Gates (pictured in 2018) announced their divorce in 2021
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel appears on Joe Rogan Experience episode 2190
Rogan (pictured in another episode) asked if the nonprofit was a way to “whitewash” his past.
Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates and Bill and Boris Nikolic, scientific advisers to the Foundation, in 2011
During the interview, Thiel referred to the relationship between Epstein and Bill Gates.
The couple supposedly metseveral times‘ despite revelations about Epstein’s sex trafficking of minors since his first guilty plea in 2008.
Melinda Gates cited Epstein’s “evil and abhorrent” relationship with Bill among her reasons for the divorce, telling CBS: “I didn’t like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein.”
Last year it was reported that Epstein had apparently threatened and tried to blackmail Bill Gates over an alleged affair.
Bill has since admitted that meetings with the disgraced financier were a “big mistake.”
“(Bill Gates) allegedly spoke to Epstein early on about how his marriage wasn’t going very well and Epstein suggested to him that he should get a divorce, around 2010, 2011,” Thiel claimed, unchallenged by Rogan.
“And Gates said something to her like, you know, that doesn’t quite work, presumably because they didn’t have a prenup,” she continued.
‘So there’s a part of Epstein as a marriage counselor that’s a little disturbing.
‘But the second thing we know Gates talked about with Epstein was about the whole collaboration in funding, the creation of this philanthropy, a somewhat corrupt left-wing philanthropic structure.
‘My alternative, straightforward conspiracy theory is… we combine those two and it was there…?
‘Bill and Melinda get married in 1994, they don’t sign a prenuptial agreement and something goes wrong with the marriage and maybe Melinda can get half the money in a divorce.
“He doesn’t want her to get half the money. What do you do?”
Thiel, who was struck Last month, Melinda Gates, having done insufficient philanthropy, sensationally claimed that Bill had intentionally “locked” Melinda into the nonprofit to restrict her access to his money.
He framed the conspiracy as a trope of what he called the “left-wing philanthropic world,” used as a “way for baby boomers to control their crazy wives.”
“It’s a way to whitewash your past, isn’t it?” Joe Rogan responded.
There is no evidence that Thiel’s self-proclaimed “conspiracy theory” is valid.
Gates admitted he met with the financier and described the meetings as a “mistake.”
“I made a mistake meeting Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe his[Melinda’s]instincts were sharper than mine,” she told the BBC in 2022.
“Any encounter I had with him could be seen as some sort of approval of his bad behavior. So it was a mistake.”
Melinda Gates announced she would leave the Foundation in May 2024, saying the move was part of her transition to “the next chapter of my philanthropy.”
The Gates Foundation is the world’s largest private charitable foundation, with an endowment of $75.2 billion as of December 2023, according to its website.
In 2015, Melinda founded her own organization, Pivotal Ventures, which aims to implement innovative solutions to problems affecting women and families in the United States.
‘Under the terms of my agreement with Bill, upon leaving the foundation I will have an additional $12.5 billion to devote to my work on behalf of women and families.
‘I’ll share more about what this will look like in the near future.’
Bill and Melinda met in 1987, the same year he became the world’s youngest billionaire at the age of 31.
They married in Hawaii in 1994 and have three children together: Jennifer, 28, Rory, 24, and Phoebe, 21.
Their divorce came amid rumours about Gates’ troubled love life after it emerged he had an affair with a Russian bridge player and that Jeffrey Epstein had tried to “extort” him over the relationship.
Peter Thiel founded Confinity in 1998 (initially Fieldlink) before it merged with Musk’s X.com.
According to Forbes, Thiel is now worth an estimated $8.4 billion.
Melinda Gates, then co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, participates in a panel on empowering women as entrepreneurs and leaders in Washington in 2023
The Microsoft founder said he never had any business relationship or friendship with Epstein and that their meetings were solely to discuss philanthropic initiatives.
After announcing his divorce from Melinda, Microsoft employees claimed that Gates had had sexual relationships with employees and journalists.
New York Times journalist Anupreeta Das claims in a forthcoming book that Bill was “like a kid in a candy store” with the company’s attractive young female interns, and that they were eventually banned from being alone with him.
In the upcoming book ‘Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World’, it is claimed that the Gates’ marriage finally reached a breaking point in 2019 when his connection to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein came to light.
After Bill’s connections to Epstein (which he claimed were for purely philanthropic reasons) came to light in 2019, Melinda reportedly began consulting lawyers about dividing up his $150 billion.
Thiel, who has supported several right-wing causes and has expressed support for Trump in the past, has found himself aligned with Musk in support Republican campaigns.
Musk, who founded PayPal in 2000 by merging his direct bank X.com with Confinity, has clashed with Bill Gates in the past, having been criticized for not giving away more of his fortune and allegedly criticizing Gates’ approach to charity in return.
Musk reportedly asked Gates why he had shorted Tesla shares, expecting their value to fall, prompting an apology.
Musk biographer Walter Isaacson said Musk nevertheless felt Gates’ work on climate change was hypocritical and said he could not “take his climate philanthropy seriously.”
Musk continued to mock Gates’ appearance in a post on Twitter.
DailyMail.com has contacted the Gates Foundation for comment.