Employees at Bill Gates’ mega-charity organisation claim to have been intimidated by the billionaire’s domineering behaviour, with one even likening the tech mogul to French King Louis XIV, a new book claims.
The billionaire Microsoft co-founder and creator of one of the world’s largest philanthropies, Gates is said to have dominated the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with an intimidating presence, making staff fearful of his “interrogations.”
The charity was renamed the Gates Foundation following the departure of his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, who divorced him over his alleged infidelity and friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
While the outside world perceived Bill Gates as a “global statesman”, those who interacted with him professionally saw him as an “absolute monarch”, New York Times reporter Anupreeta Das writes in a new biography of the billionaire.
“He’s the scariest person in the world to give recommendations or explanations, because he’ll just skim through the pages and say, ‘What’s in the footnote on page 9 doesn’t match what’s in the footnote on page 28,'” a former employee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told Das.
Das’ new book, “Billionaire, Geek, Savior, King: Billionaire and His Quest to Shape the World,” was released nationwide recently.
Book excerpt It was featured on the news site Business Insider.
A former foundation official told Das that meetings with Gates “were as if Gates was King Louis XIV and employees were courtiers at Versailles bowing before him, stooping to curry favor with the king.”
Another former executive told Das that during meetings, staff “scrutinized Gates’ facial expressions.”
“A slight smile or a nod can signal approval, while a blank look can mean disapproval,” Das writes in his book, citing a former executive.
Das said Gates’ feedback or lack thereof will be a topic of discussion among staff for days after the fact.
“After the meeting, participants would return to their offices and desks and spend days analyzing Gates’ questions and phrases, then be ecstatic when they concluded they’d made a good impression on their boss,” another person who attended the strategy meeting told me.
Foundation staff sought praise from their superiors, but “even the absence of blame was seen as justified,” the former staffer told Das.
“There were sometimes hours of back and forth between directors and teams trying to interpret what Gates wanted,” the person said.
“I felt like I was spending more time managing my boss than working to meet people’s needs.”
The Washington Post has reached out to Gates for comment.
A spokesperson for Gates told Business Insider, “The book contains highly sensationalized claims and outright falsehoods that rely almost entirely on second and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources and ignores the actual documented facts that our firm provided to the author on multiple occasions.”
