‘Kid at a candy store’: Microsoft once barred interns from being alone with Bill Gates, new book claims

Microsoft boss, Bill Gates was barred from being alone with interns at the company, claims an upcoming book written called “Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World” by Anupreeta Das, a journalist at New York Times. As cited by Daily Mail, Gates was engaged in inappropriate behaviour towards several women that compelled the company to take such measures. The book describes Gates, who recently got divorced after 27 years of marriage, as a man who exhibited a pattern of unwanted advances and flirtatious conduct towards employees and interns alike despite having a philanthropic image.

The book states that Bill Gates, one of the richest tech leaders, “flirted with some of the interns at the Gates Foundation, putting them in the uncomfortable position of having to think about their career prospects while not wanting to be hit on by the boss." She even stated that Gates was like “a kid at the candy store” when it comes to young interns at Microsoft.

Bill Gates office gave an official statement to The New York Post, bashing Das for her book. It read, “Relying almost exclusively on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources, the book includes highly sensationalized allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts our office provided to the author on numerous occasions.”

Gates got divorced from his wife in 2021. Das even revealed that the problems started arising right after Melina French Gates and Bill Gates got married in 1994 when Gates started seeing his ex Ann Winblad.

Recently, in a podcast with Jay Shetty, Melinda French Gates opened up about her marriage to the tech mogul. She described her separation as “the hardest thing” she had to go through. She revealed that there wasn’t “enough trust” in their relationship.

She said, “I had thought I was going to be married for life. I thought I'd be married for 50-plus years. So all of a sudden, you see that even despite very much work and counselling, what you had doesn't actually exist. And that, for me, I couldn't go forward. There wasn't enough trust any longer. So it wasn't something I wished for, I certainly didn't think I would be in my late 50s and be divorced.”