news24 made the video kinda confusing. they showed new hallway cctv of aka moving with a suitcase between 7:02-7:24, then the call at 7:38. they’re arguing that the fall happened before the 7:38 call. he went back in the room, she fell, then he called.
@Shalewa__m@Tb0Touch The call happened after she jumped. The time of the cctv footage and time of the call to reception paint that picture if you watch properly
Bill Gates' daughter got caught skimming affiliate commissions with an invisible browser tab. Not a rumor. Bloomberg tested it, a fraud researcher tested it, a competitor tested it, and all three watched Phia's extension plant its own tracking code on purchases it had nothing to do with.
The mechanism takes 30 seconds to understand. Online retail pays commission to the last referrer before a sale. A reviewer spends 40 hours testing headphones, you buy through their link, they get a cut. But a browser extension sits inside your browser and sees every checkout, so it can jump in at the last second and overwrite the reviewer's code with its own. That's what Phia did. Background tab, code swap, commission redirected. Verified on 50+ retailers including Walmart, Nike, and Zara. It happened even when shoppers came through a Wirecutter review or typed the URL themselves.
Now the psychology. Phoebe Gates is 23 with a $100B safety net. She doesn't need the pennies. But the pennies weren't the point. Attributed sales are the growth number that got Hailey Bieber and Khloé Kardashian on the cap table and pushed the valuation to $185M in under a year. Every hijacked commission made the dashboard look better than the product.
That's the actual danger of founders with nothing to lose. A founder who needs the company to eat is paranoid about what the code does. A founder who needs the company as a personal brand ships whatever moves the chart, and when it blows up, apologizes and moves on with the same last name.
Phia called it a coding glitch. https://t.co/lfAwgEnpiH suspended them and opened an investigation, because affiliate networks have seen this before. Honey allegedly did the same thing, sold to PayPal for $4B, and is in a class action over it now.
A kid with generational wealth built software that takes rent money from product reviewers so a pitch deck would look good. She'll be fine. The reviewers won't get their commissions back.
Phia — the buzzy shopping app co-founded by Bill Gates' daughter, Phoebe — is claiming credit for online sales it didn’t actually drive, a Bloomberg investigation found. Read our exclusive story: https://t.co/KYuWkmkE7D
📷️: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images