Bill Gates left the Microsoft board in 2020 as the board pursued an investigation into the billionaire’s romantic relationship with a female employee, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
This was “an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably,” a spokeswoman for Gates told the Journal.
The employee, an engineer, claimed in a letter to have had a physical relationship with Gates “over years,” the Journal reported.
A spokesperson for Microsoft said that the company was alerted in the second half of 2019 that “Bill Gates sought to initiate an intimate relationship with a company employee in the year 2000.
Gates, who founded Microsoft in 1975. He left his full-time role at Microsoft in 2008 but remain as board director. He stepped down as the company’s CEO in 2000, saying he wanted to focus on his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The philanthropic organization founded in 2000 in Seattle of the USA after a merged of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation.
It is a largest American private foundation founded by Bill and Melinda Gates spends billions of dollars every year on initiatives aimed at eradicating infectious diseases and reducing poverty.
