Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was like a “kid in a candy store” when it came to new interns at the software company — forcing management to stop them from sticking with the billionaire, according to a new bombshell book .
A forthcoming story by New York Times reporter Anupreeta Das paints an unsavory portrait of one of the world’s richest men, offering lurid details about his alleged infidelity that left his wife Melinda French Gates “to be seen for a long time”.
It was not unusual for Gates to flirt with women and pursue them, making unwanted advances such as to ask a Microsoft employee to dinner while he was still the company’s chairman, Das wrote in “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates. and his quest to shape our world,” according to excerpts reported by the DailyMail. com.
Trouble arose almost immediately after the couple married in 1994, with Gates courting his former flame Ann Winblad, a tech entrepreneur, according to the book, which hits stores in August. 13.
He had an unusual arrangement with his wife that allowed him to visit Winblad once a year at her home in North Carolina, the book says.
According to Das, French Gates personally reviewed her husband’s security team because of her concerns that they were “enabling him to be places where [she] didn’t know it was him.”
The book also reported that his wife ordered the couple’s housekeepers not to give out his direct phone number when the women called home.
The nervous tycoon “assumed his behavior would have no consequences,” according to Das, who wrote that the marriage eventually ended due to “different notions about the meaning of a marriage contract.”
While she “sincerely believed that being married would make a difference because of her deep belief in her sanctity,” Bill Gates felt that “love and marriage can often mean two different things,” according to Das.
The tycoon’s wandering eye allegedly extended to young women working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to Das, Gates “flirted with some of the interns at the Gates Foundation, putting them in the uncomfortable position of having to think about their career prospects, not wanting to be spanked by the boss.”
“In one case, a colleague chastised a person for sending a 22-year-old intern to Gates’ office by herself, saying, ‘She’s too young and too pretty,'” Das wrote in the book.
Gates’ instructions to women were considered “clumsy and not predatory,” people who witnessed them told Das.
A former Microsoft executive said that Gates does not “prey” on women or ask for sexual favors in exchange for advancing their professional prospects.
“He’s not Harvey Weinstein … I don’t know of any real situation in which anyone took anything to sleep with Bill,” the former executive told Das.
Gates, 68, showed a “certain naivete in his interactions with women, mistaking engaged conversation for common interest,” the executive added.
The final straw for French Gates was her husband’s alleged friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who framed Bill Gates multiple times after the disgraced financier pleaded guilty to having sex with a minor.
The couple divorced in 2021, and French Gates created the foundation earlier this year to launch her own philanthropic company.
The Post reached out to French Gates through her major ventures for comment.
A spokesman for Bill Gates criticized Das and her book.
“Relying almost exclusively on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources, the book includes highly sensational claims and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts that our office has provided the author on numerous occasions,” said the representative from Gates office in. a statement provided to The Post.
“Mr. Gates has previously expressed his deep regret for meeting with Epstein, with whom he only met for discussions related to philanthropy.”
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