Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing

Bill and Melinda Gates announced Monday that they are divorcing after 27 years of marriage.

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Bill Gates issued a statement, attributed to the couple, detailing the split via Twitter.

Although the pair intends to continue working together through their humanitarian foundation, the Gateses stated that they no longer believe they can “grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives.”

Bill Gates, who co-founded Microsoft, is worth an estimated $124 billion, according to Forbes.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, created in 2000 by merging the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, bills itself as a nonprofit that fights “poverty, disease and inequity around the world.”

According to the foundation’s website, the organization had supported an array of programs through grant payments totaling nearly $55 billion cumulatively through the fourth quarter of 2019.

Last year, Bill Gates, formerly the world’s richest person, said he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board to focus on philanthropy.

Gates was Microsoft’s CEO until 2000 and since then has gradually scaled back his involvement in the company he started with Paul Allen in 1975. He transitioned out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft in 2008 and served as chairman of the board until 2014.

In 2010, the Gateses and billionaire Warren Buffett created the Giving Pledge, an effort The New York Times characterized as “an effort to get wealthy individuals to commit to donate a majority of their money to charitable causes.”

-The Associated Press contributed to this story.

Cox Media Group