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Under fire Phoebe Gates once belonged to a secretive, invitation-only Stanford class called “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” where students are “taught how to identify vulnerabilities in systems of power,” The Post can reveal.
Years before her shopping startup, Phia, was hit by allegations it exploited illegal loopholes, billionaire Bill Gates’ daughter, now 23, was among a hand-picked group of Stanford students in a secret society who study how power works — and, according to one former student, how to “hack” it.
The unofficial 10-week course, nicknamed “Rule,” isn’t publicized, has no enrollment code and accepts just 12 students — six men and six women — at a time. They meet weekly to debate money, power and “the underlying incentive structures and frameworks that govern how the world works,” according to The Stanford Daily.
Getting in requires a referral from a former student and an intense interview process. Candidates are asked to recommend their most accomplished male and female peers, while founder and instructor Justin Lewis-Weber — who personally selects the final dozen — grills applicants about their ambitions and beliefs.
One former student told the Stanford Daily the goal was to teach students “how to essentially hack any kind of power structure or bureaucratic structure and get what they want in a system of people.”
Another described Lewis-Weber’s entrepreneurial philosophy as “hackier” and “more opportunistic.”
“It’s more about identifying the vulnerabilities or loopholes,” the former student claimed. “I think he’s less concerned with the ethics of it all and the problem-solving elements.”
Both Gates and Lewis-Weber did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
There is no evidence the class had anything to do with Phia’s alleged dodgy affiliate practices. But Gates didn’t leave the Rule network behind at Stanford.
Former Rule students frequently go into business together, and Gates has recruited for Phia through the class, according to a student interviewed by the Stanford Daily — however, her Stanford pal and Phia co-founder, Sophia Kianni, was not a member of the group.
The lessons Gates absorbed at Stanford have this week gained an interesting new perspective.
Phia — the AI-powered shopping startup Gates and Kianni launched in 2025 — is embroiled in a scandal over allegations its browser extension took credit, and commissions, for online purchases it didn’t actually generate.
Testing by Bloomberg, affiliate-marketing researcher Ben Edelman and Capital One Shopping found Phia’s browser extension tagged its users with cookies which made it look like the app was referring customers who actually came from elsewhere.
The practice, commonly called “cookie stuffing, has previously resulted in federal wire-fraud prosecutions.
However, Gates and Kianni have not been charged with any crime. Legal experts told The Post this week criminal prosecution — let alone anything approaching wire fraud’s theoretical 20-year maximum sentence — appears unlikely and civil court claims and repayment demands are a more realistic outcome.
When asked about the practice, Phia blamed it on a software issue which it had (somewhat handily) said it discovered just 24 hours earlier. However, internal messages reported by Bloomberg showed the founders aware of and discussing the automatic cookie-dropping features months before.
In a Dec. 18 Slack message, Gates wrote she was “worried this is an issue across the board,” before asking if an automatic cookie drop was operating on all sites.
Kianni separately wrote: “Whatever we can do to keep these cookies dropping will be amazing thank you.”
The amounts they were making were substantial. Bloomberg reported that in June it accounted for roughly 51% of the money Phia claimed. After the features were disabled in July, their average daily revenue reportedly plunged from around $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000. Phia claimed that drop also reflected its decision to disable other monetization methods.
The fallout threatens to derail what had been a remarkably fast rise for Gates and Kianni.
The pair met at Stanford, where Kianni, an Iranian-American, had arrived from a very different background to her tech royalty pal.
Kianni had founded Climate Cardinals as a teenager to translate climate information into languages other than English and became the youngest US member of the UN Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. She has said she worked to become financially independent from her parents and paid her own Stanford tuition.
The friends became roommates and planned startup ideas before graduation — including, notably, a “Bluetooth tampon” — but settled on launching an online tool for shopping comparison which also found discounts and secondhand alternatives.
The company raised a whopping $43.5 million before launch from heavyweight venture firms and celebrity backers featuring Kris Jenner, Khloé Kardashian, Jessica Alba, Alix Earle, Hailey Bieber and Paris Hilton.
“Kris and Khloe obviously have concerns anytime a company they’ve invested in becomes caught up in allegations like this,” a Post source said.
“They made the investment based on their understanding of the company at the time, so naturally they want clarity now about the allegations and whether there is anything that could affect the business or their investment.”
Gates’ name surely helped, but her billionaire dad didn’t bankroll the company. However, the Microsoft founder wasn’t entirely removed from it, either.
“My dad is super supportive,” Phoebe told The Post in an April 2025 interview for Phia’s launch. “He helps me, you know, thinking about engineering, hiring, things like that.”
However, even before Phia’s cookie scandal blew up, some in the venture-capital world had been irked by what the app’s “over-the-top” hyping its celebrity investors, whihc some felt took its embrace of influencer culture to another level.
For instance, to spread the word of its $35.5 funding round, Phia posted a glowing nine slide presentation highlighting its celebrity investors who joined, including Sydney Sweeney, but there was no mention of Phia’s institutional investors – Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins – which typically commit the lionshare of capital in celebrity-heavy funding rounds.
Some investors took the omission as Phia “thumbing their nose” at traditional Silicon Valley financiers.
“They have this weird almost movie theater-esque thing about them,” said one tech investor who was aware of Phia’s fundraising efforts but never wrote them a check. “Every time I see someone do that, usually there’s trouble,” adding that his firm “dodged a bullet.”
Within tech circles, the scandal has generated a significant amount of animosity toward Phia, the source added, questioning whether Phia duped its own investors while raising its most recent funding by showing them phony metrics.
“I’m really amazed by the passionate growl this is getting,” the insider said.
Gates and Kianni were always eager to present themselves as hands-on founders immersed in building the product, adding they had been coding until around 2 a.m. the night before.
“We’re all staying up super late. We’re ordering a pizza. We’re working together,” Gates told The Post of startup life.
They also decided to turn their entrepreneurial journey into content too.
In April 2025, Gates and Kianni launched podcast “The Burnouts” under “Call Her Daddy” star Alex Cooper’s Unwell Network, promising listeners a peek inside the “chaotic lives” of the startup founders.
However, it didn’t set the podcasting world alight and their deal with Unwell ended after roughly a year, for reasons which have never been disclosed. However, the podcast has continued independently.
Being born into one of the richest and most recognizable families in the US meant Gates enjoyed privilege, but also had a lot to live up to.
Born in 2002, she grew up alongside older siblings Jennifer, 30, and Rory, 27, in the family’s sprawling lakefront estate in Medina, Wash.
She graduated Stanford in 2024 with a degree in human biology. Her mother, Melinda French Gates, delivered the commencement address.
Her parents had insisted she finish college — despite her father famously dropping out of Harvard.
Gates, who is also trained in ballet, has at least been candid about her huge head start in life.
In a 2022 interview she said: “OK, I’m my parents’ daughter, that gives me immense privilege, but it’s not what I’m defined by. I want to have my own identity.”
While building Phia with Kianni, Gates also insisted she wanted its success to have “no ties to my privilege or my last name.”
She’s already managed to make a stir for herself in celebrity circles, dating Paul McCartney’s grandson Arthur Donald for roughly two years before the pair split in 2025.
The heiress then revealed in December she was dating Chez Flynn, who she earlier mysteriously described as a new man who “literally doesn’t have Instagram”.
“Like, he deletes it, and it’s amazing,” she said on a Sept. 4, episode of “The Burnouts,” before identifying him as her high school sweetheart, who she’s known for 15 years.
The Phia scandal, however, has opened Gates up to exactly the criticism she’s been careful to avoid — a well-connected “nepo baby” catapulted into Silicon Valley’s fast lane then accused of taking shortcuts to success.
“I can’t say I am surprised… I don’t know a single person who actually used the app,” a fashion and media source sniffed to The Post.
“The product didn’t work or make much sense… You don’t need an app to online shop. If she didn’t have her last name she never would have been able to raise that kind of money from those kinds of people. And she was also distracted and wanted to be an influencer-podcaster…”
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However, another fashion insider said it was simply a reminder Gates’ privilege comes with intense scrutiny and ensures anytime she stumbles the world will be watching.
“There were a lot of envious women eager to tear her down — she had a target on her back,” the source told The Post.
“The decision to launch the investigation and follow such a small company so closely wouldn’t have happened to anyone else. The practice of cookie stuffing is not uncommon; My sense is a lot of online shopping companies do that as they are starting out and get away with it. She was trying to build something… I feel for her.”
English (US)