Gates job hopefuls asked - what porn do you like?

One woman was asked if she had ever a STD while others were asked if they had explicit pictures of themselves on their phones.

Bill Gates watches the tennis at Indian Wells in March last year. SPicture: AFP

Women applying for jobs at Bill Gates’s personal office were asked sexually explicit questions during the interview process to find out if they could be vulnerable to blackmail, it has been claimed.

Female applicants are said to have been put through a screening process by a security firm that ­included queries on extramarital affairs and what kind of pornography they enjoyed. One woman was asked if she had ever contracted a sexually transmitted disease, while others were asked if they had explicit pictures of themselves on their phones, according to The Wall Street Journal. Candidates were also asked if they had ever “danced for dollars”.

A spokeswoman for the private office, Gates Ventures, said that she was unaware of such questions being asked by third-party contractors. “This line of questioning would be unacceptable and a violation of Gates Ventures’ agreement with the contractor,” she said. “We have never received information from any vendor or interviewee in our 15-plus year history that inappropriate questions were asked during the screening process. We can confirm that, after a comprehensive review of our records, no employment offer has ever been rescinded based on ­information of this nature.”

The security firm, Concentric Advisors, said it had complied with the law while screening ­potential employees for information that could compromise them working for one of the world’s richest men. Gates is worth $US118bn ($178bn).

On its website, Concentric ­Advisors says it offers “family ­office security” for “high-net-worth clients”. Its duties include conducting “due diligence checks on vendors”.

A spokesman for Concentric told the newspaper it had never initiated questions about a job ­applicant’s sexual or medical histories and suggested that the information could have been volunteered by candidates.

Employment experts questioned how relevant such information could be and questioned whether it would be legal. Queries on an applicant’s sexual history were “deeply offensive and it has nothing I can conceive of whether a person can do a job”, Lindsay Halm, a Seattle employment ­lawyer, said. “I suppose if you’re working at a sex toy store or an adult film store you might conceivably have a job-related question about that.”

The 67-year-old co-founder of Microsoft has been criticised for his own lapses in judgment in ­recent years. He is alleged to have conducted multiple extramarital affairs and his former wife, Mel­inda French Gates, suggested that his relationship with the child abuser Jeffrey Epstein played a role in their 2021 divorce.

Mr Gates has told of his regret at associating with Epstein after he had been convicted of sexually abusing girls. Earlier this year it was reported Epstein had sent a menacing email over the tech billionaire’s affair with a Russian bridge player 30 years his junior. In 2019 Gates was investigated by Microsoft for an alleged affair with an employee.

THE TIMES