Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, is considered a genius and hard-working man and of course he is rich. But this genius has faced backlash and grabbed headlines in the past for all the wrong reasons. And he is again in the news!
Flirty and inappropriate emails
The Wall Street Journal reports that Bill Gates used to send flirty and inappropriate emails to female employees in 2007. The report says that in 2008, Brad Smith who is the current vice chairman and president of Microsoft and a former hiring manager named Lisa Brummel confronted Bill Gates following which he agreed he will stop sending emails to female employees.
Business Insider approached the former CEO of Microsoft to comment on the matter but his spokesperson said: “These claims are false, recycled rumors from sources who have no direct knowledge, and in some cases have significant conflicts of interest.”
In 2008, Microsoft executives warned him not to send flirty emails to a female employee. However, they dropped the matter after he said he would stop doing so, the company has revealed. In 2020, Gates resigned from the boards of Microsoft.
Though Microsoft has declined to comment but has confirmed The Wall Street Journal’s report.
Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw told The Wall Street Journal that the 2008 warning from company executives came shortly before Bill Gates stepped down as a full-time employee. Furthermore, he said that in the emails Bill Gates had suggested meeting the employee outside of work. He told the newspaper that the emails were flirtatious and inappropriate but “not overtly sexual.”
Affair with female employee
According to the Wall Street Journal report, after Bill and Melinda French Gates announced that they are ending their 27 years of marriage, multiple news reports claimed that Bill Gates was behaving inappropriately with female employees.
In 2019, the Microsoft board hired a law firm to find out if Bill Gates had an affair with a female engineer in 2000, the report said. An engineer had claimed in a letter that she had a sexual relationship with him over several years.
Links between Bill Gates & Jeffrey Epstein
A New York Times report suggested that Bill Gates met with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on several occasions and even stayed late at his New York townhouse. Epstein, who died in jail in August 2019, allegedly ran a massive network of underage girls for sex. His trial on federal charges related to sex trafficking was awaited.
In August this year, Bill Gates had told CNN that meeting Epstein was “a huge mistake”. He even admitted that he had “several dinners” about a philanthropy project.
ALSO READ: Microsoft Investigated Bill Gates Over His Relationship With An Employee
