Warren Buffett Shrugs Off Bill Gates’ ‘Distasteful’ Link to Jeffrey Epstein: ‘He Made Mistakes…’

Investing wiz Warren Buffett said Bill Gates had a “distasteful” relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and certainly made “mistakes” by being linked to the dead sex criminal, but he doesn’t believe the Microsoft co-founder did anything unforgivable.

The Berkshire Hathaway chairman discussed the matter during a Wednesday interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick on Squawk Box. Buffett said he read a “great deal” of the files on Epstein released by the Justice Department earlier this year, and didn’t find anything damning in regard to Gates.

“I’ve read his remarks to Congress under oath, and I’ve read cross-examination, and while it’s distasteful, while he made mistakes, I’ve made mistakes in hiring all kinds of people or choosing friends and then finding out later that one way or another they weren’t what I thought they were,” Buffett said. “So I found nothing in there that was beyond what I could picture myself doing.”

He continued, “Life goes on. And no one bats 1.000 in the business of choosing people.”

Gates first met Epstein in 2011, three years after he was convicted of procuring a minor for prostitution. The files released by the DOJ showed Epstein sent himself several emails where he talked about getting drugs for Gates and the tech tycoon having an extramarital affair.

NBC News reported in February:

In one of the emails, Epstein wrote that he had decided to resign from a role he had with the Gates Foundation and BG3, a think tank founded by Bill Gates, because he got “caught up in a severe martial dispute between Melinda and Bill.”

“I have the greatest respect for my friend of 7 years, and wish them both well,” Epstein wrote.

With multiple typos, Epstein wrote of his relationship with Gates: “In my role as his right hand I had been asked on mulitple occassion and in hindsight , wrongly acquiesced into participating in things that have ranged from the morally inappropriate , to the ethically unsound and had been repeatedly asked to do other things that get near and potentially over the line into the illegal.”

Epstein described those activities as “helping Bill to get drugs, in order to deal with consequences of sex with russian girls, to facilictating his illicit trysts, with married women,to being asked to provide adderal.”

Gates denied the allegations in a statement to the outlet.

“These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false,” the statement said. “The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”

Buffett has been close pals with Gates for decades and pledged the bulk of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006. He has given more than $47 billion to the foundation before he canceled donations in March; Buffett told CNBC on Wednesday he ended donations to the Gates Foundation because he wanted to give more dough to his family, not because of the Epstein files.

Watch above via CNBC.

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