Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates's "flirty" nature had prompted the company's management to ban young interns from being alone with the billionaire, a new book has claimed. The upcoming tell-all by New York Times journalist Anupreeta Das said that Gates was like a “kid in the candy store” when it came to the interns.
It also revealed details of Gates's infidelity that left his wife Melinda French Gates “seething for a long time.”
According to the book, it was not unusual for Gates -- one of the richest people in the world -- "to flirt with women and pursue them, making unwanted advances such as asking a Microsoft employee out 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.
In excerpts published by DailyMail, problems between Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates arose almost immediately after they got married in 1994 with Gates pining for his former partner and tech entrepreneur Ann Winblad.
Das wrote in her book that Gates's wandering eye allegedly extended to young women working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
According to Das, the Microsoft co-founder “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.”
“In one instance a colleague chastised one 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 scheduled to be released on August 13.
Gates’ overtures to women were considered “clumsy rather than predatory,” people who witnessed them firsthand told Das.
One former Microsoft executive told Das that Gates did not “prey on” women or ask for sexual favors in exchange for promoting their work prospects.
“He’s not Harvey Weinstein… I know of no real situation in which anyone got anything for sleeping with Bill,” the former executive told Das. Instead, he showed a “certain naivete in his interactions with women, mistaking engaged conversation for mutual interest,” the executive added.
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