Wild side of Gates revealed

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 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 “spoonfed stories”.

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 laid bare Gates’ 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,” it says.

Wallace said Melinda “was well aware of Gates’ womanising” even after they started dating. They announced their divorce after 27 years of marriage in a joint statement this month. Court documents showed Melinda filed for divorce and stated in the petition their marriage was “irretrievably broken”.