Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been making headlines ever since he announced that he is getting a divorce from his wife Melinda Gates after 27 years of marriage. Now, in another shocking revelation, journalist James Wallace who authored two books about Gates during the 1990s, has accused Gates of being a ‘womanizer’ since his early years.
In an interview with the Daily Mail, Wallace said that the billionaire was far more than just “a little computer nerd”. He claimed that Bill Gates held “wild” naked parties with strippers in his bachelor days.
“Gates was no choir boy in his early days as a tech founder”, Wallace said in an interview with the British newspaper, furthering that Gates’ ‘womanizing’ wasn’t even curtailed when he began dating his now-estranged wife Melinda Gates, which ultimately led to their divorce.
Bill Gates held ‘wild parties’ in his home, James Wallace discloses
“A lot of those Microsoft kids back then, they were young guys in pizza-stained t-shirts for two or three days working on software code,” Wallace said, adding: “Then they would have some pretty wild parties, where they would go out and get strippers in Seattle and bring them over to Bill’s home.”
The alleged ‘wild parties’ use to take place at Bill Gates’ Laurelhurst, Washington home and were first detailed in James Wallace’s book, Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace.
Bill Gates was a womanizer and the media and Melinda knew about it, claims the journalist
According to the journalist, the mainstream media wanted to focus on the tech mogul’s technology and business stories and therefore “didn’t report on the wild bachelor parties that Microsoft’s boyish chairman would throw in his Seattle home, for which Gates would visit one of Seattle’s all-nude nightclubs and hire dancers to come to his home and swim naked with his friends in his indoor pool.”
It was a continuation from his time at Harvard, where he “did like to frequent Boston’s notorious Combat Zone, with its porn shows, strip joints, and prostitutes,” Wallace wrote.
“Though Gates began dating Melinda in 1988, he continued to play the field for a while, especially when he was out of town on business, he would frequently hit on female journalists who covered Microsoft and the company industry,” the author wrote.
“His womanizing was well known, although not well reported” and his wife “was well aware of Gates’s womanizing,” and “consequently their relationship ran hot and cold,” Wallace said.
Media only reported what they were spoon fed by Microsoft: James Wallace
He furthered that though Gates fixation was well known, it was not reported since the billionaire spoon fed stories to media houses like the New York Times, which did not want to miff the tech giant as it would stop the “flow of information”.
“At one point, they (Bill Gates and Melinda Gates) broke up for nearly a year, reportedly because Gates refused to make any kind of commitment. When they got back together again in 1992, however, the relationship grew closer and stronger,” Wallace continued.
Unsubstantiated claims of Gates’ affair doing the rounds
Recently, after Bill Gates announced his divorce, reports started pouring in that the billionaire might have reverted to his old habits. Some reports claimed that Gates relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ann Winblad was one of the reasons behind his split with Melinda Gates.
It is to be noted that Gates and Winblad broke up in 1987 but despite that, the duo went on vacation together alone for a weekend every year throughout his marriage to Melinda.
Another unsubstantiated claim began doing the rounds that Gates was having an affair with a 36-year-old Chinese interpreter who works for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Zhe ‘Shelly’ Wang, however, refuted the claims that she was responsible for the divorce of the couple.
“I thought that the rumors would go away by themselves, but I did not expect the rumors to become more and more crazily spread,” Wang wrote on Weibo.