Bill Gates known for ‘womanising’, naked pool parties, biographer says

A biography on Bill Gates spills the beans on what the tech mogul’s life was like in his bachelor days.

A womaniser who would throw naked pool parties with strippers is not the image that comes to mind when you think of tech mogul Bill Gates.

But that’s what is suggested of the the Microsoft co-founder in his bachelor days – even after meeting future wife Melinda, according to a biography.

In the 1997 biography Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace, James Wallace wrote Gates’ wild side was well known among his cohort – but news outlets kept it out of their pages to continue getting “spoon-fed stories”.

US Microsoft founder millionaire Bill Gates’ reputation as a family man is not as squeaky clean as it looks, according to a biography.

They “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,” Wallace wrote.

Gates’ lively lifestyle dated back to his days in Harvard where he “did like to frequent Boston’s notorious Combat Zone, with its porn shows, strip joints, and prostitutes,” Wallace wrote.

The biography, the second Wallace has written about Gates, also laid bare Gates surprising ways after he started dating his future wife in 1998.

“He continued to play the field for a while, especially when he was out of town on business, when he would frequently hit on female journalists who covered Microsoft and the company industry,” according to the biography.

Footage from Bill and Melinda Gates wedding posted on her Facebook account for their 25th wedding anniversary.

Wallace insists Melinda “was well aware of Gate’ womanising” even after they started dating.

“Consequently their relationship ran hot and cold,” Wallace wrote.

He said the couple “broke up for nearly a year” because of Gates’ refusal to commit.

“When they got back together again in 1992, however, the relationship grew closer and stronger,” he wrote.

The former couple announced their divorce after 27 years of marriage in a joint statement earlier this month.

Court documents showed that Melinda filed for divorce and stated in the petition that their marriage was “irretrievably broken”.

The documents also revealed that the Gates’s don’t have a prenuptial agreement in place, but will divide their assets according to a separation agreement.

Bill Gates and Melinda in 1998. Picture: Getty Images

Bill Gates was formerly the world’s richest person and his fortune is estimated at well over $100 billion.

The Gates’s met after Melinda began working at Microsoft as a product manager in 1987. They married in 1994.

Time magazine previously reported that before Gates met Melinda, he dated Ann Winblad, a software entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Although the couple split in 1987, they still shared a strong bond.

“Even now, Gates has an arrangement with his wife that he and Winblad can keep one vacation tradition alive,” the outlet alleged.

Bill and Melinda Gates, with their family. Picture: Facebook

“Every spring, as they have for more than a decade, Gates spends a long weekend with Winblad at her beach cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they ride dune buggies, hang-glide and walk on the beach.”

“We can play putt-putt while discussing biotechnology,” Gates told the magazine in 1997.

Melinda was reportedly concerned about Gates’ relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein years before the pair announced they were separating.

Ms Gates and her advisers conducted a “number of calls” in October 2019, the journal said, around the time the New York Times revealed Mr Gates had met with Epstein on “numerous occasions”.

Ms Gates had concerns about her husband’s relationship with Epstein as far back as 2013, according to the journal.