Microsoft Probed Bill Gates’ Past Affair With Employee Before He Left Board

Gates said he left his post on the Microsoft board in 2020 to focus on philanthropy.

Board members for Microsoft determined in 2020 that the company’s co-founder, Bill Gates, needed to step down from his own role on the board amid an investigation into a past affair with a female Microsoft employee, according to a new report. The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, first reported on Sunday that the company hired a law firm to investigate the claims after an engineer wrote a letter in 2019 that detailed a prior relationship Gates had with a female employee. The company confirmed it opened what it called a “thorough investigation” at the time, although it did not say if it had urged Gates to leave his post at the tech behemoth.  “Microsoft received a concern in the latter half of 2019 that Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “A committee of the board reviewed the concern, aided by an outside law firm, to conduct a thorough investigation. Throughout the investigation, Microsoft provided extensive support to the employee who raised the concern.”