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.
