Bill Gates’ 23-year-old daughter Phoebe Gates made headlines this week for all the wrong reasons.
Damning internal Slack channel messages obtained by Bloomberg revealed that the queen of nepo babies knew since at least December that her online shopping company Phia had deceptively been collecting commissions on sales it had nothing to do with through its “personal shopping assistant” browser extension. The shady practice, called “cookie stuffing,” could land her in considerable legal trouble — a “max penalty of up to 20 years prison,” according to one attorney.
The embarrassing revelation comes a month after Bloomberg first reported on the subject, with Phia promising it’d fixed the issue and blaming “technical anomalies.”
But the newly-revealed Slack messages show that Gates was fully aware of the practice long before Bloomberg‘s investigation. Gates and her Phia cofounder Sophia Kianni were warned by the startup’s engineers that using the company’s browser extension to drop cookies on unsuspecting users to take a cut from sales was in violation of Google’s Chrome Extension policy. According to the Slack exchanges, Gates told employees that “we should capture every transaction,” while Kianni urged them to “keep these cookies dropping” at all costs.
The situation demonstrates a perhaps unsurprising degree of hubris for a recent daughter of one of the richest men in the world and recent inductee to the extremely controversial Forbes “30 Under 30” list.
That extent of Gates’ self-conceit may also be the result of a secondary education at Stanford University, which is known to indulge in privileged people’s already heightened sense of self-worth. As the student-run newspaper the Stanford Daily reported in May, Gates even attended a secretive off-the-books course, which was never publicized and required a referral from another student, called “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” — or “Rule” in the shorthand of the Stanford set.
The content of the course, which saw 12 students meet once a week during the winter quarter, sounds about as ominous as its name suggests. The course’s instructor, Silicon Valley investor and Stanford graduate Justin Lewis-Weber, took it upon himself to bring together “like-minded folks who dared to dream bigger together,” as a former student put it in an interview with the Daily.
Another student added that the goal was to teach students “how to essentially hack any kind of power structure or bureaucratic structure and get what they want in a system of people.”
“It’s more about identifying the vulnerabilities or loopholes,” the same student added. “I think [the instructor is] less concerned with the ethics of it all and the problem-solving elements.”
Another student said the course focused on the “cynical parts of Silicon Valley,” describing the instructor behind it as “power hungry, intellectual, but really focused on profit and power instead of doing good.”
The course wasn’t incidental to Gates’ professional career, either. Another student told the Stanford Daily that Gates used the class to recruit for Phia.
Considering how long Gates knew about her startup’s dicey and potentially fraudulent practice — which accounted for over 50 percent of Phia’s revenue in June, per Bloomberg‘s estimates — she must’ve been taking plenty of detailed notes during the class.
More on Gates: It Seems Like Bill Gates’ Daughter May Be in Serious Legal Trouble