Sara Mauskopf

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.

it's funny to see people who were clearly told to tweet more (or let the comms team tweet for them) who would have done much better staying a little mysterious.

A Brown professor gave his students a take-home midterm exam. After suspecting many cheated using AI, he made the final in-person. The orange dots are the midterm scores and the gray dots are the final scores. Looks like all but 3 cheated on the midterm.

In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year. That single inversion explains why "we will not" is the most accurate line ever written about US soccer. FIFA built a global system for this. Training compensation and solidarity payments send a cut of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player, from age 12 onward. Develop one future pro and your academy gets paid for a decade. Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax, every Bundesliga academy runs on this logic. The kid is the asset. US Soccer refuses to enforce those rules. When Seattle's Crossfire Premier claimed its $60,000 share of DeAndre Yedlin's transfer to Tottenham, it got nothing. Claims on the Dempsey and Bradley transfers died partly because the federation couldn't even produce the youth training records. So American clubs earn zero dollars when a kid turns pro. They earn when a kid enrolls. Which makes the parent the customer, and the product is whatever keeps the parent writing checks: travel tournaments, hotel weekends, $500 showcase events, private training at $100 an hour. Elite pathways run $8,000 to $20,000 a year. A comparable academy spot in Italy costs about 120 euros. Follow the incentive one level deeper and it gets darker. A club dependent on fees can't cut its weakest paying players, so rosters optimize for retention over development. The scouting pool shrinks to families who can afford the cliff, which appears around age 11, exactly when development matters most. The country runs a talent filter sorted by household income instead of ability. Every four years someone proposes fixing this. The proposal always requires the people profiting from the $15,000 model to vote themselves out of business. They will not.