Gates and his wife Melinda announced their divorce on May 3 after 27 years of marriage

It was announced that in 2020 Bill Gates left the Microsoft board to concentrate on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Buy through the Sunday report Gates may have been pressurized by other board members' statement that he had an unsuitable relationship with a female employee. The employee who is an engineer claimed in a letter that Gates has had a sexual relationship with Gates "over years," the Journal reported.

 Gates spokeswoman said, "There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably." Gates' decision to leave the board "was in no way related to this matter. He had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier."

March 2020 the founder and former head of the US technology giant stepped down as board chair. According to the spokeswoman, Gates left Microsoft to focus more on his philanthropic organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A spokesperson for Microsoft told AFP that the company was alerted in the second half of 2019 that "Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000. A committee of the Board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm, to conduct a thorough investigation."

Now some board members also asked about links between Gates and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for allegedly trafficking minors. Besides it, Gates's team assured the board the Microsoft founder had met Epstein for some working issues.

Gates stepped down as the company's CEO in 2000, who founded Microsoft in 197 to focus on his foundation.

After that, his seat as board director was the last position in the company.