Since the divorce, Melinda, who met Bill in 1987 when she started working as a product manager at Microsoft, the company Gates had co-founded 12 years earlier, is worth around $6.2 billion (£4.6 billion). And so she joins the club, along with the first wives of Tesla’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sergey Brin, who have all found themselves single in middle age with billions to work out what to do with.

Getting so rich so suddenly must take the sting out of becoming the clichéd ex-wife of a nerdish tech bro. But what makes the First Wives most interesting is what they do with that cash. In almost all cases, they’ve decided to give it away.

“I’m sure they’re doing it for the right reasons, but there’s some interesting messaging here,” says one Silicon Valley expert. “The tech billionaires are seen as super-baddies who hoard their wealth. For these ex-wives, who have often been cheated on, using philanthropy is an interesting way of sending a message. Giving away the money they won in their divorces could almost be said to be a form of revenge.”

In Bill and Melinda’s case, they clearly bonded over philanthropy: from 1994 to 2018, the couple gave their foundation more than $36 billion. But one thing Melinda has in common with the sisters in her club is that she’s endured a lifetime of simply being seen as “the spouse” behind a great genius, and once they’ve broken free, it’s little surprise that they feel a shared desire to help lift up other women. 

Tahmima Anam author of novel The Startup Wife, says: “These start-up men are often held up as male visionaries by other people, but the wife has to deal with the image and the real person, which is the worst setup for equality in a marriage. It is not surprising that when they exit their marriages, they want to do something interesting for themselves.”