Bill Gates' Daughter Knew For Months That Her App Claimed Sales It Didn't Drive, Report Claims

Key Points:

• A Bloomberg investigation accused Phia, a shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, of engaging in cookie stuffing—an unethical practice that falsely claims sales commissions by secretly dropping affiliate cookies without user consent.
• The startup allegedly used features like “enable coupon auto drop” to drop cookies on all websites visited by users and every two hours on top sites, even when users did not use coupons or tried to close pop-ups, violating digital platform policies.
• Internal Slack messages suggest that Gates and Kianni were aware of and actively encouraged these practices months before the initial report, contradicting earlier claims that the issue was a software bug recently fixed.
• After disabling the cookie-stuffing feature, Phia’s revenue reportedly dropped significantly, from $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000, according to internal charts cited by Bloomberg.
• Phia denied the allegations, attributing revenue decline to other factors, and stated plans to hire a head of compliance to prevent future issues.