Ending up in a loveless marriage, sneaking away from a harpy wife to meet a friend she dislikes, and being taken to the cleaners thanks to not getting a prenup are all common enough experiences for pasty nerds-turned-professionals in America. But it is quite remarkable to learn that a centibillionaire has the same problems. Even Gates’s affairs hardly evoke the wild oats-sowing of Bill Clinton or Donald Trump. Instead, they are the sad indiscretions of a man wholly out of his element. In 2006, for example, he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. Mr Gates, who at the time was the company’s chairman, left the meeting and immediately emailed the woman to ask her out to dinner, according to two people familiar with the exchange. ‘If this makes you uncomfortable, pretend it never happened,’ Mr Gates wrote in an email, according to a person who read it to the New York Times. The woman was indeed uncomfortable, the two people said. She decided to pretend it had never happened.