Bill Gates Tells House Oversight Panel He Regrets Meeting Jeffrey Epstein

Bill Gates acknowledged before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that his contact with Jeffrey Epstein was a mistake, according to testimony the panel released. In his own words, Gates told committee members: "I should never have met with Epstein in the first place." The disclosure comes via the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which made the testimony public.

What Gates Said on the Record

The released testimony centers on Gates's own admission of regret over the association. His statement to the committee is unambiguous: the meeting should not have happened. The panel's decision to release the testimony puts the record into public circulation directly from a congressional disclosure rather than from secondary accounts or media reconstructions.

The Committee's Role

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee — the House's primary investigative body — is the entity that obtained and released the testimony. Congressional disclosure of this kind carries a different weight than civil litigation or press reporting: it enters the formal legislative record. Gates's words now exist as a named, attributed statement in that record, available for citation without further intermediary.

What the Source Does Not Establish

The released summary does not specify when Gates gave the testimony, what questions committee members asked beyond the topic of his Epstein ties, or what additional findings, if any, the panel drew from the session. No dollar figures, dates of meetings, or names of other parties appear in the disclosed material summarized here. Reporting on those specifics will require the full transcript or further committee disclosure.

For a tech-adjacent figure of Gates's profile — co-founder of Microsoft, chairman-era influence at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — congressional testimony of this nature is unusual. The committee has now made his own characterization of the contact the authoritative public record on the question of whether the meeting should have occurred. His answer: it should not have.