Jeremy Stamper 🇺🇸 🇺🇦@jeremymstamper
I’ve known Phoebe Gates online since she was a teen, so I might be biased but nothing in the Bloomberg reporting shows she personally engaged in wrongdoing. Phia’s browser extension opening background tabs and inserting affiliate codes comes from technical implementation choices made by engineers, not from Phoebe herself. She isn’t a software developer, she didn’t write the extension, and there is no evidence she directed anyone to override other affiliates or manipulate commissions. What happened is exactly the kind of over‑aggressive optimization that crops up in early‑stage tech products, especially in the messy world of affiliate tracking where scripts, libraries, and automated logic can behave in ways founders never intended.
The reporting makes clear that independent researchers discovered the issue, Capital One Shopping flagged similar behavior, and Phia acknowledged the violation and fixed it. That sequence is consistent with a technical mistake, not a deliberate scheme. If Phoebe had intended to deceive, the company wouldn’t have immediately admitted the problem and patched the code. It’s far more plausible that she learned about the issue at the same moment the public did, then ensured her team corrected it.
Her broader behavior reinforces this interpretation. She runs Phia like a normal startup founder—negotiating frugally with influencers, declining inflated rates, and trying to build a sustainable business rather than exploiting systems. Nothing about her conduct suggests someone orchestrating a covert affiliate‑fraud operation. The allegation is about code, not character, and the code was fixed as soon as the problem surfaced.
The fairest conclusion is that Phoebe Gates did nothing wrong. A technical misconfiguration occurred, it was corrected, and there is no evidence she knew about it, intended it, or benefited from it in any deliberate way. If you want, I can also expand this into a more forceful version or reshape it into a legal‑style defense.
