Totti and Blasi, when separations are a complicated affair

Not just personal life, which in these cases is always public, and not just a matter of gossip. The separation between Francesco Totti and Ilary Blasi is also a complicated business from an economic point of view. There are twenty years of joint business to dissolve, or in any case to rearrange, in addition to the management of children and the compensation that usually accompany any divorce. A footballer like Totti and an exponent of the world of entertainment like Blasi have not only earned a lot so far, with their respective careers, but they have also invested a lot in entrepreneurial activities and accumulated a lot from a patrimonial point of view. There are several companies set up for the management of interests which, together or separately, first flanked and then, in the case of the former Roma captain, replaced the main activity. The great media echo that is accompanying the announcement of the separation, the hashtag #Totti has entered among the world trends and is firmly in first place in Italian trends, together with the attention that the specialized press and is not dedicating to indiscretions and conjectures on the reasons, will soon be accompanied by a complicated legal and financial game for the separation of assets and the management of entrepreneurial activities. It is not the first and it will not be the last time that famous and multimillion-dollar couples are called to face a path of separation that inevitably also involves a tiring parallel path, of an economic-financial nature. What happens with ‘normal’ couples, who often experience ‘expensive’ separations, is amplified in the presence of large fortunes and ramified interests, with long-term consequences also for children and other family members. The proportions are different, because the accumulated wealth is different, but looking at the case of Totti and Blasi there are two stories, also very different from each other, that come to mind when we talk about great separations: that between Silvio Berlusconi and Veronica Lario , in Italy, and the one between Bill and Melinda Gates, globally. In the first case, a long dispute, also fueled by the attention with which the press followed the developments, ended in February 2020 with an agreement that eliminated all the pending issues. Silvio Berlusconi has given up on asking about 46 million euros that his ex-wife owed him on the basis of the Supreme Court which confirmed the revocation of the divorce allowance. Veronica Lario has given up asking for another 18 million. The game of cross foreclosures that had started during the proceedings also ended in this way. The case of Bill and Melinda Gates has different characteristics. The divorce was formalized with a ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court on August 2, 2021. A separation by consensus ensued, with neither former spouse called to pay maintenance to the other. The assets of the founder of Microsoft, or rather of the couple, amounted to about 152 billion dollars at the time of the sentence and, assuming a division to the cent, Bill and Melinda Gates can count on 76 billion dollars each after the divorce. The other significant aspect is the attempt, at least for the two years following the divorce, to jointly manage the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has an endowment of about 50 billion dollars.