Bill Gates' Daughter Phoebe's Reputation Has Gone From Bad To Worse

Tech billionaire Bill Gates famously plans to leave only a tiny fraction of his massive wealth to his children. "I don't think that amount of money would be good for them," he told the Daily Mail in 2011, adding that while his kids' necessities would always be covered, he wanted them "to find their own way." However, Bill's insistence that he tried to avoid spoiling his now-adult children is increasingly looking like a failed narrative, especially when it comes to his youngest daughter, Phoebe Gates. Bill's not-so-humble brags betray just how out of touch his kids really are, while Phoebe herself effectively soured her own reputation through some rather spoiled behavior in the past. And from the sound of things, her reputation has only gone from bad to worse since then.

Much of the drama surrounding Phoebe centers around Phia, a shopping app she co-founded in 2025. That May, content creator and stylist Jarrod Jenkins put Phoebe and her business partner, Sophia Kianni, on blast over TikTok for asking him to review and promote the app without compensation. "They want all of the publicity, none of the work," Jenkins said. 

In April 2026, Phia's PR was dealt yet another blow when a separate creator by the name of Kacie Margis went public with a similar experience she had with Phoebe around the same time as Jenkins' encounter with the billionaire's daughter. In a post to Threads, which included a screenshot of a direct message Phoebe allegedly sent her, Margis revealed that the Gates heiress asked her to promote Phia on the cheap. Phoebe's message reportedly said, "We're still a scrappy startup so budget's super limited ... " Alexa, play "Common People" by Pulp.

In her initial Threads thread calling out Phoebe Gates and Phia, content creator Kacie Margis opened up about why exactly Bill Gates' daughter's low-ball offers were so insulting to professional influencers. For starters, as the aforementioned screenshot shows, Phoebe discovered Margis on a Cameo-esque platform called Collabstr, where the latter clearly shows her promotion rates. However, Margis believed Phoebe tried to haggle with her directly over Instagram DMs in an apparent effort to circumvent those rates.

Margis' story was soon picked up by the Daily Mail, though the influencer was less than pleased with the publication's coverage. "Well, this was a disappointing article. None of my actual statements were used," she wrote in a follow-up Threads post, adding, "My issue isn't about one DM, it's about a broader pattern: wealthy founders leveraging power and proximity to wealth to secure free or discounted labor. Framing this as isolated misses the systemic reality creators face every day." Margis added that she doesn't even hold a grudge against Phoebe, in particular, and requested her followers not harass her. Rather, she said, "I just want people in positions of privilege to value creators."

In the unused quotes she provided to the Daily Mail, which she also posted on Threads, Margis further explained that the prevalence of this issue is precisely why she decided to publicly air her encounter with Phoebe in the first place. To that end, she reiterated that, "Calling it a 'scrappy startup' while coming from extreme wealth felt disingenuous," though added that Phoebe is far from the only one to try and pull this sort of thing. "But this is a common tactic: downplaying resources to justify underpaying labor," Margis said. Still, it's hardly a flattering look for Pheebs.