For years, corners of the internet have claimed a familial connection between Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. For instance, in early August 2024, an X account posted what appeared to be a newspaper clipping that read:
Bill Gates with Rabbi Schneerson the head of the Jewish extremist end times cult Chabad Lubavitch. Gate's mother is a Maxwell, related to the Israeli Mossad agents Robert Maxwell and his daughter Ghislaine, who used child trafficking to blackmail world leaders with Jeffrey Epstein. Do you get it yet?
In other words, the X post claimed Gates and Maxwell were related through his mother and her father, both whom have the same last name — "Maxwell."
That image supposedly showing Gates and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson — a Jewish leader of Chabad-Lubavitch, a branch of Orthodox Judaism originating from Eastern Europe — has circulated before. In August 2020, for example, a Facebook account that shares QAnon conspiracy theories posted it. (In reality, the photo did not depict Gates, but rather, Israeli-American environmentalist Yosef Abramowitz. Abramowitz publicly shared the old photo of himself for a 2014 article he wrote for The Jerusalem Post. In that article, the photo was captioned: "The author with the Lubavitcher Rebbe in 1992.")
The claim about family ties between Gates and Maxwell has spread in many forms, sometimes without the miscaptioned photo. For instance, in December 2021, an X account asserted the two were first cousins, writing:
Bill Gates mother real name is #MaryMaxwell, Chairwomen of United Way. She is from a wealthy banking family. Mary Maxwell cousin/sister of #RobertMaxwell, #father of #GhislaineMaxwell. So Ghislaine Maxwell and Bill Gates are cousins! Well. That's interesting.
However, this claim alleging a family connection between Gates and Maxwell — whether as cousins or otherwise — is false, according to various online genealogical records for both parties. Furthermore, if such a connection were real, news reports or biographies about Gates and Maxwell would have mentioned it. That was not the case.
William "Bill" Henry Gates III was born in Seattle in 1955 to parents William H. Gates Sr. and Mary Maxwell. Both parents were born in the U.S., and it was her last name that prompted the false rumors about an alleged connection with Ghislaine Maxwell's family.
It's possible for two people to share the same last name without being relatives. Hypothetically speaking, for Bill Gates and Ghislaine Maxwell to be cousins through his mother, Mary Maxwell, she would need to be the sister of Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell's father. However, according to multiple genealogical reports, that was not the case. Rather, Bill Gates' mother was an only child, the daughter of Nebraska-born James Willard Maxwell.
Furthermore, while Bill Gates' family has deep roots in the United States and identifies as Catholic, the family of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was born in France, is firmly European. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch in Czechoslovakia.
He was
In sum, the family trees of Bill Gates and Ghislaine Maxwell are separate. Their ancestral histories do not intersect in any way, according to the genealogical records.
Snopes has previously fact-checked surprise familial relations, including the true claims that former U.S. President Barack Obama is distantly related to actor Brad Pitt and that King Charles III descends from Vlad the Impaler. On the flip side, actors Jeremy Allen White and Gene Wilder are not relatives, contrary to claims online.