Employees who worked at at Bill Gates’ mega-charity claimed they were terrified by the billionaire’s domineering behavior — with one was likening the tech tycoon to France’s King Louis XIV, according to a new book.
Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft who went on to start one of the world’s largest philanthropic endeavors, is said to have lorded over the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with an intimidating presence that left staffers dreading his “inquisition.”
The charity has been renamed the Gates Foundation following the departure of ex-wife Melinda French Gates, who divorced the software pioneer over his reputed philandering as well as his friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
While Bill Gates was perceived by the outside world as a “global statesman,” those who interacted with him professionally saw him as an “absolute monarch,” New York Times journalist Anupreeta Das wrote in her new biography of the billionaire.
“He’s the scariest person in the world to provide a recommendation or briefing to because he scans a page and comes back at you saying something like, ‘what you say in the footnote on page 9 does not match with the footnote on page 28,’” a former employee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told Das.
Das’s new book, “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World,” was recently released nationwide.
An excerpt of the book appeared on the news site Business Insider.
A former foundation executive told Das that meetings with Gates “had the feel of a king holding court, as though Gates were Louis XIV and the employees were courtiers bowing and scraping before him in Versailles, hoping to earn their ruler’s favor.”
Another ex-executive told Das that staffers “would scrutinize Gates’s expressions” during the meetings.
“The slightest hint of a smile or a nod could mean that he approved; an impassive face could mean he didn’t,” Das wrote in the book, citing the ex-executive.
Gates’s feedback — or lack thereof — would be the talk among staffers for days after the fact, according to Das.
“Once the meeting ended, and people went back to their offices and desks, they would dissect Gates’s questions and expressions for days, often celebrating if they concluded that they had impressed their boss,” another person who attended the strategy sessions told the author.
Foundation staffers sought praise from their boss, though “even the absence of opprobrium was seen as validation,” a former staffer told Das.
“Sometimes, the interpretation of what Gates wanted could take up hours of back and forth among the directors and teams,” this person said.
“I felt we were spending more time managing up than working to meet the needs of the people.”
The Post has sought comment from Gates.
A Gates spokesperson told Business Insider: “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.”