The Gates Foundation Is Investigating Bill Gates's Epstein Ties — With Bill Gates's Endorsement, and a Scope He Helped Define
The Gates Foundation has denied two things about its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The press has been reporting a third denial the Foundation never made — and the external review it announced on April 21 has been scoped around what the denial leaves uncovered.
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On Tuesday, April 21, 2026, the Gates Foundation announced that it has commissioned an external review of its past engagement with Jeffrey Epstein.1 The review was first announced internally in a March 11 memo. It is expected to report this summer. The third-party investigators have not been publicly named.
The news was reported across every major outlet — the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, the Seattle Times, Reuters, Fox News Digital, CNBC, the Daily Beast — most of them citing the same Foundation talking point to frame the story: that “they never created a fund together and the foundation made no payments to Epstein.”
Read carefully, that talking point is not what the Foundation said.
What the Foundation said, in its February 2026 statement to Reuters, was narrower:
The Foundation “did not make any financial payments to Epstein or employ him at any time and that it regrets having any employees interact with him in any way.”1
That is the denial, in full. It addresses two things:
Payments. No money flowed from the Foundation to Epstein.
Employment. Epstein was never on the Foundation’s payroll.
It does not deny co-designing a financial vehicle, as I reported on in Part I and Part II of my Epstein Files investigative series. It does not deny shaping a governance structure. It does not deny adopting design features Epstein communicated to JPMorgan’s most senior executives. It expresses regret about employee interactions — a rhetorical move that concedes the interactions occurred while reframing them as unwanted rather than institutional.
Every major account of the April 21 external review announcement — the Associated Press, Fox News Digital, the Seattle Times, CNBC, the Daily Beast — has carried a paraphrase of the Foundation’s position that reads broader than the Foundation’s own words. The most common construction has been some variant of: “They never created a fund together and the foundation made no payments to Epstein.” That first clause is the press’s gloss, not the Foundation’s claim. The Foundation has not publicly denied creating a fund. It has denied paying one.
The Seattle Times, meanwhile, reported on April 21, based on documents its staff reviewed, that at least five Gates Foundation employees — in addition to Bill Gates himself — corresponded with Epstein between 2011 and 2014 using their official Gates email addresses.2 “A small number” is six.
This post reads the federal record against what the Foundation actually said, and against the scope of the review the Foundation has now commissioned.
What the federal record documents
The question the record raises is not whether the Foundation paid Epstein or employed him. It is whether a fund the Foundation principals participated in was shaped by Epstein’s documented communications with JPMorgan’s most senior executives.
The documentary sequence:
February 17–18, 2011. JPMorgan’s Juliet Pullis sent Epstein a structured questionnaire at Jes Staley’s direction, asking him to define the architecture of a Gates-linked fund. Epstein replied the same evening with a fully formed vision — a donor-advised fund structure with governance layers, an investment committee, a distribution committee, and a link to the Giving Pledge’s then-$60 billion in committed capital.3
August 17, 2011. Epstein emailed Mary Erdoes — CEO of JPMorgan Asset and Wealth Management, writing to her while she was on vacation in Maroon Bells, Colorado — with the structural parameters of the fund: perpetual duration, succession controls, an offshore arm “especially for vaccines,” donor anonymity, custom investment portfolios, predefined silos. He projected “billions of dollars” in year one and “tens of billions by year 4.”4
![[IMAGE: Epstein’s August 17 email to Erdoes — EFTA01256269]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LJz1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7b0cd8a9-041d-4cbd-ab25-0a6d52a85982_1676x2232.png "[IMAGE: Epstein’s August 17 email to Erdoes — EFTA01256269]")
August 28, 2011. Epstein wrote to Staley and Erdoes explaining that “Bill is terribly frustrated” and insisting that the presentation include the phrase “additional money for vaccines.”5
