Article By Frank Bergman
Globalist billionaire Bill Gates’s 23-year-old daughter Phoebe attended a secretive, off-the-books Stanford University course that taught a handpicked group of ultra-privileged elite students how to manipulate and control society.
The classes guided students on how to navigate power structures, exploit bureaucratic weaknesses, steer public opinion, and get what they want from institutions.
The invitation-only course, titled “So You Think You Can Rule the World?” was never publicly advertised.
It was unavailable to ordinary Stanford students without a referral.
Details of Gates’s participation have resurfaced as her startup, Phia, faces a major scandal over internal Slack messages showing that Gates and co-founder Sophia Kianni knew the company was using a controversial affiliate marketing practice known as “cookie stuffing.”
The revelations raise fresh questions about how Gates approached power, business, and ethics after attending a class explicitly designed around understanding and exploiting institutional systems.
Secret Class Taught Students to Exploit Power Structures
The Stanford course consisted of just 12 students who met once a week during the winter quarter.
Silicon Valley investor and Stanford graduate Justin Lewis-Weber taught the program, which participants simply referred to as “Rule.”
One former student said Lewis-Weber sought to assemble “like-minded folks who dared to dream bigger together.”
Another student described the course in far more revealing terms.
The goal, the student said, was learning “how to essentially hack any kind of power structure or bureaucratic structure and get what they want in a system of people.”
“It’s more about identifying the vulnerabilities or loopholes,” the student added.
“I think he’s less concerned with the ethics of it all and the problem-solving elements.”
Another participant described the class as focused on the “cynical parts of Silicon Valley.”
The student characterized Lewis-Weber as “power hungry, intellectual, but really focused on profit and power instead of doing good.”
The course was never part of Stanford’s publicly available curriculum and required students to gain admission through personal referrals.
Gates Used Secret Class to Recruit for Phia
The course was also connected directly to Phoebe Gates’s business ambitions.
According to the Stanford Daily, another student said Gates used the class to recruit workers for Phia.
Phia is a browser extension marketed as a “personal shopping assistant” that helps consumers find clothing deals and earns commissions when users purchase items through affiliate links.
But Bloomberg later found that the extension was claiming commissions on sales it had not actually generated, as Slay News reported earlier.
The company’s software automatically dropped affiliate tracking cookies and, in some cases, overrode legitimate referrals.
Internal Slack messages obtained by Bloomberg showed that Gates knew about the practice months before the company publicly blamed the problem on “technical anomalies.”
Gates told employees that “we should capture every transaction.”
Kianni likewise urged engineers to “keep these cookies dropping” even after concerns were raised about compliance.
Cookie Stuffing Accounted for Massive Share of Revenue
The controversial practice reportedly accounted for more than half of Phia’s claimed sales in June.
Bloomberg estimated that cookie stuffing represented approximately 51 percent of the company’s sales attribution during that month.
When Bloomberg first confronted Phia, the company said the issue had been fixed within 24 hours.
However, the newly surfaced Slack messages showed that Gates and Kianni were aware of the system well before the investigation.
Corporate attorney Ariel Givner has warned that cookie stuffing has previously been treated as federal wire fraud in U.S. courts.
Givner said the conduct can carry a “max penalty of up to 20 years’ prison” along with fines and restitution.
No criminal charges have been filed against Gates.
‘Rule the World’ Course Takes on New Significance
Gates has repeatedly tried to separate herself from the enormous wealth and influence of her billionaire father, insisting that Phia would succeed with “no ties to my privilege or my last name.”
Her attendance at a secret Stanford course teaching students how to exploit institutional weaknesses now casts that claim in a very different light.
The class was not built around ordinary entrepreneurship.
Participants described it as a program for learning how to identify loopholes, manipulate bureaucratic systems, and obtain desired outcomes from structures of power.
And Gates did not merely attend.
She used the class to recruit for the very company now under scrutiny over a business practice that allegedly exploited weaknesses in affiliate marketing systems.
For a startup founder who insists she built her success independently, the combination of elite access, a secret power-focused Stanford course, and internal messages about keeping controversial revenue-generating practices alive paints a striking picture.
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