Former employees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reported a high-stress work environment focused on appeasing Bill Gates. The foundation’s strategy review meetings caused anxiety, as staff meticulously prepared to meet Gates’ expectations. Gates’ management style was seen as intimidating, leading to a culture of fear and deference, according to a new book by Anupreeta Das.

Former employees of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have described a stressful internal culture marked by deference to the founders and fear of making mistakes, according to a new book ‘Bill Gates and his Quest to Shape the World’.
The foundation’s annual strategy review meetings were a source of particular anxiety, with employees frantically preparing presentations and scrutinising Bill Gates’ every reaction.

“It seemed that many employees were motivated more by Gates’s praise — sometimes, even the absence of opprobrium was seen as validation — than by the success of their grant-making,” one former attendee told the author Anupreeta Das.
Several ex-employees characterised the atmosphere as deferential, with staff tiptoeing around Gates and eager to do his bidding. “There was no handbook for how to deal with the foundation’s co-founders, especially with Gates,” Das writes.
Gates’ management style was described as imperious and intimidating by some. “He’s the scariest person in the world to provide a recommendation or briefing to,” said one former foundation employee, noting Gates’ ability to spot minor discrepancies in documents.

A “low hum of fear” among staff

The organisational culture led to what Das called a “low hum of fear” among staff. If Gates sent an email requesting something, it could spark a flurry of up to 100 internal messages as employees tried to decipher his meaning and determine how to respond.
Some former executives found Gates’ approach frustrating, particularly those hired for their expertise. “It’s like using the Socratic method . . . with an autocrat,” one ex-employee said of Gates’ questioning style in meetings.

While some employees adapted to the high-pressure environment, others struggled. Das reports that people at the foundation generally fell into three categories: loyal “consiglieres,” young aspirants in awe of Gates, and sceptics who found him domineering and eventually left.

A Gates Foundation spokesperson disputed the book’s characterizations, calling them “highly sensationalised allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts.”