Microsoft executives warned Bill Gates in 2008 to stop sending flirtatious emails to a female employee but dropped the matter after he told them he would stop, the company has said.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Microsoft’s then-general counsel Brad Smith and another executive met with Mr Gates after the company discovered he had sent inappropriate emails to a mid-level employee.
According to the newspaper, Mr Gates – who had stepped down as CEO years before the allegations but still played a day-to-day role at Microsoft – didn’t deny the exchanges at the time.
Members of the Microsoft board declined to take further action because there wasn’t any physical interaction between Mr Gates and the employee, the newspaper reports.
A spokesperson for Microsoft confirmed the reporting, telling the newspaper the emails from 2007 were discovered by the company the following year.
The spokesperson said: “These emails proposed meeting outside of work and off-campus. While flirtatious, they were not overtly sexual, but were deemed to be inappropriate.”
A spokesperson for Mr Gates told the newspaper the claims are “false, recycled rumours from sources who have no direct knowledge, and in some cases have significant conflicts of interest.”
Earlier this year, the tech giant admitted that in 2019 it had hired a law firm to “conduct a thorough investigation” of separate allegations from a female Microsoft engineer that Mr Gates had “sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee”.
At the time, a spokesperson for Mr Gates said: “There was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably.”
Mr Gates stepped down from the Microsoft board in 2020, saying in a public statement that he would on his philanthropic work alongside his wife Melinda Gates.
His spokesperson said: “Bill’s decision to transition off the board was in no way related to this matter. In fact, he had expressed an interest in spending more time on his philanthropy starting several years earlier.”
Bill and Melinda Gates announced their divorce in May this year after 27 years of marriage, though the former couple still jointly runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Mr Gates was Microsoft’s CEO until 2000 and since then has gradually scaled back his involvement in the company he started with Paul Allen in 1975. He transitioned out of a day-to-day role in Microsoft in 2008 and served as chairman of the board until 2014.