Bill Gates’ 23 Year Old Daughter Phoebe Is Being Accused Of A ‘Cookie Stuffing’ Scandal At Her Shopping Startup Company And Could Face 20 Years In Prison

Jamie McCarthy. Getty Images.

Did you know Bill Gates has a 23 year old daughter named Phoebe who looks like this? 

Me neither. Now if there's one thing I recall about Bill Gates outside of Microsoft and the Epstein stuff, it's that he told his kids they'd get virtually none of his inheritance when he passes, with a large majority going to charity. A quick Google search tells you Bill has roughly $108 billion to his name. Now how much of that is truly his and what would go in his will, that's another story, but he said his three kids would get less than 1% of the pie. If you do the math, 1% of 108 billion is still a little over a billion dollars. If you don't think they're all walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars you're fooling yourself. Still though, Bill decided when he kicks the can he's not going to just hand over his empire to the children. He said he wanted his children Phoebe, Jennifer, and Rory to forge their own paths. Admirable if this wasn't coming from the guy who was tightly connected to Jeffrey Epstein. 

Well, you know what happens when you encourage your kids to forge their own paths and be go-getters? They go to prison. 

(NY Post) Bill Gates’ “nepo baby” daughter Phoebe Gates, 23, has been accused of “cookie stuffing” at her multibillion-dollar startup, Phia – an illicit practice that comes with a maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison, according to reports.

Phia – a digital personal shopping assistant co-founded by Gates with fellow Stanford alum Sophia Kianni – reacted with shock in July following reports that it was dropping more web “cookies” than it should, taking undue credit for online sales at retail partners.

Hand up, did I know what "cookie stuffing" was before today? I would have guessed that was something Alek Manoah frequented in during the offseason. Nope, turns out it's when you deceive your business partners into thinking the consumer clicked your referral link to get to their website and bought something, even though they didn't. Gates' AI-powered shopping start-up works with a ton of retail websites like Nike and Nordstrom comparing prices for clothing and other accessories to get the consumer the best bang for their buck at checkout with discount codes, similar to Honey. Phia's scheme allegedly opened up a background tab and inserted its own referral code which then triggered commission on sales it never drove. 

Phia had brought in a number of high profile investors recently such as Hailey Bieber, Sydney Sweeney, and Jessica Alba. This post on Instagram about their new investors had many laughing that it looked like a Coachella graphic. 

Well, turns out this cookie stuffing scheme was fudging the numbers big time. 

After Phia disabled the features in July, average daily revenue at the company plummeted from around $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000, according to Bloomberg. 

In June, cookie stuffing accounted for about 51% of the merchandise value that Phia claimed credit for selling, the report said.

The evidence here is comedically incriminating for Gates, with slack messages explaining the scheme, proving it wasn't just a software bug, which Phia initially drew up as the excuse in July. They can trace this back to as far as last December. No bueno. 

According to an internal dashboard viewed by Bloomberg, what Phia initially called a software bug in July was actually a feature called “enable coupon auto drop,” which the company was able to switch on and off.

In a Slack channel on Dec. 18, she wrote: “worried this is an issue across the board…can u confirm auto pop for cookie drop is live on ALL sites w a coupon to confirm we are monetizing on all gmv.”

In a separate incident, Kianni suggested a feature that would drop a cookie each time a user simply tried to close out a Phia pop-up, according to Bloomberg. A colleague told Kianni that Google Chrome prohibits extensions from dropping affiliate cookies on “dismiss events,” or when a customer simply tries to close out a notification, and Kianni conceded.

But she added: “I guess we could say that the user is trying to open us and roll it back if they complain,” according to the report.

Apparently this is considered wire fraud and carries a maximum 20 years in prison. Now I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that Bill Gates' daughter is not going to jail for 20 years. I'd go as far to say I doubt she serves any time at all because that's how it works with these kind of situations with the ultra rich and white collar crimes. Dad isn't dead yet, I'm sure he'll have no problem bailing you out of your scumbag dealings here. Apple doesn't fall from the tree I guess. 

Gotham. Getty Images.

Age old lesson, if you ever fall upon a billion dollar fortune, don't make your kids have to work for their own money. This is what happens. Just give it your kid, let them become Bruce Wayne, the city gets saved over and over again. Everyone's happy. 

P.S. Curious what happens to her co-founder Sophia Kianni, who does not have a dad who controls the world.