Bill Gates‘ nepo daughter Phoebe knew her shopping app was using a forbidden trick to rake in commission it did not earn for far longer than she previously let on, it is claimed.
Gates, 23, sent internal messages pushing for the feature to be deployed on her shopping comparison app Phia as far back as December 2025, Bloomberg reported.
Gates and Phia previously claimed she had only been made aware of the issue last month, after Bloomberg contacted the start-up for comment on its initial report about what was happening.
Phia described it as a ‘software bug’ at the time and removed it from their platform.
But Bloomberg now says Gates and her business partner Sophia Kianna knowingly urged their engineers to deploy features to drive up their revenues, at the expense of more honest rivals.
Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe expressed surprise on learning her shopping app Phia was using forbidden methods to earn commission last month. But it has now been claimed she knew exactly what was happening as far back as last December
Gates and her business partner Sophia Kianni. Internal messages obtained by Bloomberg are said to show Kianni pushing a means of driving up revenue that an engineer warned her was against compliance
The practice that Phia engaged in is called ‘cookie stuffing’ and is broadly forbidden by Phia’s commercial partners, including Nike, Gap and Nordstrom.
It meant Phia earned commission on purchases, even when it was actually a rival comparison service that referred shoppers to a clothing retailer.
Comparison sites like Phia earn their cash by showing shoppers a variety of potential purchases, then taking a cut of any subsequent sale that is made.
They do so by dropping an online tracker, known as a cookie, that confirms their role in driving the sale.
Comparison sites are only supposed to drop a cookie if a shopper actively interacts while using them, by clicking on one of their links, or using a coupon code.
But Phia dropped cookies for users who merely opened its website or app, without interacting with any of its services.
That process will potentially have overridden cookies dropped by rival sites that shoppers did interact with, losing those sites commission.
Gates, 23, is the youngest daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (left) and his philanthropist ex-wife Melinda French Gates (Father and daughter are pictured in June 2022)
The Phia co-founder has said she’s never received money from her famous parents for Phia (Pictured in September 2023 with mom Melinda French Gates)
Bloomberg obtained texts said to have been sent by Gates on workplace messaging app Slack that pushed for cookies to be dropped on users’ profiles automatically. The practice accounted for 51 percent of the start-up’s revenue, according to internal documents seen by the publication.
On December 18 last year she allegedly wrote to an engineer: ‘Can u confirm auto pop for cookie drop is live on ALL sites w a coupon to confirm we are monetizing on all gmv (gross merchandise value) through those or is not live.’
Gates was complaining about lower than expected revenue – $9,000 for a week – from partner website Etsy, Bloomberg said.
The same engineer then told another executive that ‘We are capturing every transaction when the user clicks the Phia icon, but the issue was that the auto-pop itself was not triggering.’
Gates is said to have responded by urging the engineer to ensure that automatic cookie drops were underway, adding: ‘this is SUPER core to rev’ (revenue).
Meanwhile, Gates’ business partner Sophia Kianni openly pushed back on another engineer who warned her against another practice that went ‘against compliance,’ according to Bloomberg.
Phia compares prices for clothing and accessories from over 40,000 retail and resale sites in real time
Kianni is said to have asked for a cookie to be dropped if a user tried to stop browsing Phia by closing a browser window or swiping out of the app.
That meant Phia could potentially earn revenue on any subsequent shopping done by a user.
The engineer who suggested that doing so was ‘against compliance’ and that doing so risked having Phia banned from Google’s Chrome web store.
Kianna reportedly responded: ‘Well so we don’t do it when they click “X” I guess we could say that the user is trying to open us and roll back if they complain.’
The scandal appears to have hit Phia’s bottom line hard. After the start-up was forced to disable its forbidden features last month, daily revenue dropped from an average of $80,000 to between just $10,000 and $28,000, Bloomberg reported.
Marketing expert Ben Edelman accused Gates and Kianni of taking shortcuts to try and make a quick buck.
He told Bloomberg: ‘These additional findings reveal a multipart effort designed to inflate Phia revenue despite lack of benefit to merchants.
‘Phia should have spent more time learning the contracts to which they were bound and less time building tricks for quick profit.’
Phia has now started to pay back some of the commission it earned from its retail partners.
Impact.com, which helps distribute payments to comparison sites like Phia, says it has banned the startup from its marketplace.
Phia shared the same statement with the Daily Mail that it gave Bloomberg, which said cookie stuffing had been halted last month, without addressing new claims that Gates and Kianna knew about issues for longer than previously stated.
A spokesperson said: ‘Any features causing misattributions were immediately removed over a month ago on July 7.
‘We are reviewing every transaction, we are fully committed to and have already begun issuing all transaction reversals to brand partners as a result of any misattribution, and we are hiring a head of compliance to make sure something like this never happens again.
‘We are now continuing to connect our users with items and offers from thousands of brand partners.
‘We will learn from this and want to ensure our users have the best possible shopping experience, with features like our new digital closet and more to come.’
Gates is the youngest daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates.
In April 2025, she launched Phia alongside her co-founder and former Stanford University roommate Kianni.
Just one week after launch, Phia was ranked No. 21 on the App Store and reached 20,000 downloads. Three months later, the company surpassed 370,000 downloads.
By September 2025, Phia had reportedly surpassed 500,000 downloads and received $8million in funding. That was followed by another $35million in funding last January, valuing the company at $185 million just one year after launch.
Phia also boasts an impressive list of celebrity investors, including Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, Spanx founder Sara Blakely, Fanatics founder Michael Rubin and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
