Bill Gates’s youngest daughter, Phoebe Gates, is facing mounting scrutiny after a Bloomberg report alleged that her AI-powered shopping startup, FIA, used a practice known as cookie stuffing—a technique that could allow the company to claim commissions on sales it did not actually generate. The allegations have reportedly triggered a furious reaction from her father, drawing one of the world’s most prominent business families into a controversy that raises serious questions about how the company operated. FIA, which Phoebe co-founded in April 2025 with her Stanford friend Sophia Keani, is a shopping platform with an app and browser extension, partnered with more than 9,600 retail brands. It aims to reinvent shopping by comparing real-time prices for clothing and other products across new and secondhand websites while providing discount codes.
The company attracted significant attention and investment, including backing from celebrities such as Khloe Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Olivia Culpo, Mindy Kaling, Jessica Alba, Sydney Sweeney, Hailey Bieber, and Priyanka Chopra. In May 2026, FIA received more than $35 million in seed funding. The controversy centers on how the platform tracked users. Cookie stuffing involves placing small data files, known as cookies, into a user’s web browser.
These cookies can make it appear that FIA referred a customer to a retailer, allowing the company to receive a commission even when the user did not actually buy the product through FIA or when FIA had no role in bringing the customer to the retailer. The practice can cause retailers to lose money and is generally considered a form of online fraud. Bloomberg reported that FIA’s browser extension could allegedly place affiliate tracking cookies even when shoppers had not taken the action normally required for the startup to receive credit for a sale. According to the report, this affected affiliate relationships with major retailers, including Nike, Nordstrom, and The Gap.
None of those companies have publicly commented on the controversy. The report cited internal Slack messages and source code, which allegedly showed that the founders were aware of automatic cookie placement features months before FIA publicly disclosed the attribution problem. Internal communications and software records reportedly indicated that the practice was active as early as December 2025. This timeline appears to contradict FIA’s earlier public statement, which claimed that leadership had only discovered the tracking behavior within the last 24 hours.
In a statement following the report, a representative for FIA said any features causing misattributions were immediately removed on July 7th. The company said it was reviewing every transaction and had already begun reversing transactions for brand partners affected by the misattribution. FIA added that it was hiring a head of compliance to help prevent a similar situation from happening again. Independent consultant Ben Edelman, a longtime advertising researcher who reviewed FIA’s practices, challenged the company’s explanation that the behavior was simply the result of a bug.
He argued that deliberately creating and deploying a feature called “autoc_drop,” which automatically places affiliate tracking codes, could not simply be dismissed as an accidental software error. He concluded that the feature appeared intentional and violated trust and contractual agreements. Following the reversal of the cookie stuffing issue, the company’s revenue reportedly dropped sharply. Bloomberg reported that FIA’s daily average revenue, which had been around $80,000, fell to between $10,000 and $28,000.
The FIA team said the decline was largely because the company had decided to stop most of its monetization efforts. Legal experts say that while prison time is unlikely, the financial consequences could be serious. Cyber law expert Stacey Cashman told the Post that federal wire fraud carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, but prosecutors would first need to prove that Gates knowingly participated in a scheme designed to defraud others. “This can’t be a careless or negligent error,” she said.
According to Cashman, the more immediate danger for Gates and FIA could be financial rather than criminal. Individuals or companies able to show they lost money because of FIA’s alleged actions could potentially take legal action through civil lawsuits. FIA has disputed parts of Bloomberg’s findings, and the company has not been charged with a crime. Following the allegations, FIA was suspended from impact.
com, one of the leading affiliate and influencer marketing platforms. Phoebe Gates, born September 14, 2002, in Seattle, is the youngest of three children born to Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. She attended Seattle’s Lakeside School, the same private school her father had attended, and later enrolled at Stanford University, where she studied human biology and completed a minor in African studies. She graduated in June 2024 with a Bachelor of Science degree.
Beyond the controversy, Phoebe has become known as an advocate for women’s health and reproductive rights. She has worked with organizations such as Reproductive Freedom for All, which recognized her in 2024 as its rising reproductive freedom champion. She has written essays about gender equality for publications including Vogue and Teen Vogue. Phoebe has said she did not rely on her family’s money to fund her business.
Instead, she raised more than $500,000 through venture capital and angel investors while also receiving another $100,000 through a Stanford entrepreneurship grant. Her father, Bill Gates, has said he was relieved that she never asked him for funding, believing that investing in her company could have made their father-daughter relationship more complicated. Bill Gates, born October 28, 1955, in Seattle, co-founded Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. He became the world’s youngest billionaire in 1987 and was ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person for 18 of 24 years between 1995 and 2017.
In 1999, he became the first person to reach centibillionaire status when his fortune briefly exceeded $100 billion. In 2000, Gates stepped down as Microsoft’s CEO, and he eventually left Microsoft’s board in 2020. Gates has devoted much of his time and wealth to philanthropy through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he and his then-wife co-chaired from 2000 until 2024. The foundation became one of the world’s largest private charitable organizations.
Following Melinda French Gates’s resignation as co-chair after their divorce, the organization was renamed the Gates Foundation with Bill Gates becoming its sole chair. In 2025, Gates published the first of three planned memoirs, “Source Code: My Beginnings,” looking back at his childhood and early experiences. The scandal surrounding FIA has put Phoebe Gates and her company under growing pressure, and the question of how Bill Gates could react to the damage it may cause to his daughter’s reputation has added another layer to the controversy.
As the situation continues to unfold, the company says it is committed to correcting any misattributions and improving its shopping experience with features such as its new digital closet.