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Phoebe Gates & Co-Founder Caught In The Cookie Jar: Slack Logs Contradict Phia's '24-Hour Bug' BS

When Bloomberg first caught Phia - the AI "personal shopping assistant" co-founded by Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe Gates and climate-activist-turned-founder Sophia Kianni - claiming affiliate commissions on sales it had nothing to do with, the company's ham-fisted damage control was a Silicon Valley classic: an unfortunate software bug, discovered "within the last 24 hours" - and of course it was 'fixed immediately.' 

Except that's total bullshit. 

According to a follow-up investigation published Tuesday, they knew about it for at least seven months - and Gates along with other execs were actively pushing for its use, according to internal Slack messages and people familiar with the matter.

Phoebe Gates

According to the report, an internal dashboard screenshot shows the automatic cookie-dropping behavior was a named feature flag that could be toggled remotely - independent researcher Ben Edelman identified it in Phia's own code as enable_coupon_auto_drop. It was reportedly switched on December 10 and switched off July 7 - which happens to be the day Bloomberg first reached out for comment. Two people familiar with the matter confirmed the toggle meant the feature was live. So after seven months, the "bug" was magically cured the moment a reporter shot off an email. 

The Bug = The Business

A Phia data scientist estimated in a July 7 Slack message that cookie stuffing accounted for roughly 51% of the gross merchandise value the company claimed credit for in June, per Bloomberg. An internal revenue chart reportedly tells the same story: when the features went dark in early July, average daily revenue collapsed from about $80,000 to somewhere between $10,000 and $28,000.

The company disputes the math - a spokesperson called the 51% figure a preliminary analysis built on flawed methodology, and says the revenue cliff also reflects Phia voluntarily shutting down most of its monetization at the same time. Except - when switching off the "bug" vaporizes the majority of your revenue, that's the business. 

The receipts

For readers unfamiliar with the affiliate marketing underworld: publishers earn commissions by dropping a tracking cookie when a shopper intentionally interacts with them - clicking a referral link, applying a coupon. Dropping cookies without user interaction is called cookie stuffing, it's prohibited by essentially every affiliate network contract, and it works by hijacking credit (and commission) from whoever actually drove the sale.

Per Bloomberg, here's what the founders were doing while their future PR statement about a 24-hour-old bug was still unwritten:

• December 18: Gates, worried that Etsy commissions were coming in light, pressed developers on Slack to confirm that automatic cookie-drops were live across every site offering a coupon - so the company would monetize all merchandise value flowing through checkout. When an engineer confirmed cookies were being set even when shoppers never touched a coupon, she reportedly reiterated that every transaction should be captured regardless. (Phia's explanation: she was concerned a broken pop-up meant users weren't seeing coupons, which would also depress attribution. Noted.)
• October through July: a feature internally dubbed "passive trigger" reportedly re-dropped a Phia cookie every two hours on any top-1,000 website where the user had ever interacted with the extension - potentially steamrolling other publishers' legitimate referrals along the way. Bloomberg says its review of Phia's historical source code confirmed the features existed.
• A second feature, also per Bloomberg, reportedly set a cookie if a shopper clicked anywhere on the page after Phia's pop-up appeared - including while trying to close it.
• Kianni, after a colleague warned that dropping cookies on dismiss events violates Google's Chrome extension policy, reportedly floated the idea of claiming users had been trying to open the extension and simply reversing charges if anyone complained - before cheering the team on to keep the cookies dropping by whatever means available. (A spokesperson says that particular feature was never implemented or launched.)

Oh, and the Slack exchanges in question? Per two people familiar with the matter, they're no longer visible to Phia employees. Memory-holed, as it were.

Sophia Kianni and Phoebe Gates announce Phia, a digital fashion platform. Credit : Emma McIntyre/Getty

Ben Edelman - the advertising consultant who has spent 20 years dismantling deceptive marketing schemes - reviewed Phia's source code and merchant data, corroborated Bloomberg's findings, and described a multipart effort engineered to inflate Phia's revenue while delivering nothing to merchants. His suggestion that the founders should have spent more time reading their contracts and less time building tricks is about as polite as this gets. Phia declined to comment on his analysis.

Sound familiar?

It should. This is the Honey playbook - the same last-click attribution hijacking that blew up in PayPal's face in late 2024 and spawned a wave of class actions and a creator revolt. The difference is that Honey's scandal was reconstructed from the outside. Phia's, per Bloomberg, comes with the founders' own fingerprints on the toggle. And cookie stuffing isn't some novel gray area: a decade ago, in the infamous eBay affiliate cases, it ended in federal wire-fraud pleas.

The fallout is already rolling. Affiliate network Impact.com suspended Phia from its marketplace after Bloomberg's first story and is reallocating unpaid commissions attributed to the startup since June 20. Phia has begun repaying retailers - and with the timeline now stretching back to at least December rather than July, that refund bill is unlikely to shrink. Nike, Gap and Nordstrom, all reportedly among the affected merchants, did not respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment.

One question the piece leaves hanging: Phia announced a $35 million Series A led by Notable Capital on January 27, at a $185 million valuation - roughly seven weeks after the auto-drop toggle reportedly went live, and weeks after that December Slack thread. The launch announcement touted, among other things, a 40% increase in monetized GMV. The growth metrics were, evidently, impressive. It's just that, if Bloomberg's reporting holds, a meaningful chunk of that growth may have belonged to somebody else.

Phia, for its part, says all misattribution features were removed on July 7, that it is reviewing every transaction and issuing reversals to brand partners, and that it is hiring a head of compliance - a role whose necessity apparently revealed itself the same day Bloomberg's phone number did. The company adds that it remains focused on giving users the best possible shopping experience, including its new digital closet feature.

But sure. It was a bug.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 16:40

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Not Winning? Just Change The Rules...

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

What binds the new Democratic Party to the new Democratic Socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome - lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster - helped give birth to the socialists.

U.S. Capitol Police move in to remove anti-war protesters interrupting Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testifying on June 24, 2026 Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the "system." Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and DOJ, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives. All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon.

By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants - without audits, English proficiency, health checks, or the ability to support themselves.

Had Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we would have had another four years and another five million illegal aliens. And perhaps America would have gone from 50 million foreign-born residents to 60 million, or about 18 percent of the population.

In this regard, the Left sees California as our most liberal - and most ideal - state and perhaps concludes that the reason is that 28 percent of its resident population is now foreign-born, with the majority arriving with vast needs for health, education, housing, and food subsidies.

Today, 50 percent of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40 percent of the population. When second-generation immigrants are added to the foreign-born population, the two groups together comprise roughly 45 percent of California's current population. This demographic transformation is one of the most profound in American history and came at a time when traditional civic education stressing assimilation, acculturation, integration, and knowledge of American traditions, history, and values was nearly nonexistent in California public schools.

So one way of achieving radical change was to alter the demography and welcome as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who arrives - or is born to immigrant parents - with both complaints against and dependence on their host country. They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of their homeland that drove them or their parents here. This strange demand to change the rules whenever they do not bode well for angry and aggrieved parties permeates every possible manifestation of the Left, but is especially egregious when demanded by immigrants who came originally as uninvited guests but almost immediately damned their magnanimous host.

It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America - only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead. Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed total strangers like themselves, and have allowed them to share in the freedom, security, and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless endlessly slander and smear.

If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did on average, the solution was certainly not SAT tutorials in the inner city or K-12 SAT outreach, demands for tougher classes in grammar, math, and analytics, or a return to the melting pot rather than the current salad-bowl tribalist model.

Instead, after the George Floyd riots, the call went out to abolish the SAT entirely - as if there had never been a purpose behind its creation. In fact, merit-based SAT exams were designed in the 1920s and 1930s to allow anyone, regardless of race, gender, region, or class, to enter college through meritorious performance on the tests - and, in particular, to overcome old-boy insider preferences and regional and ethnic prejudices.

Yet when the SAT was mostly abolished for four or five years, higher education thought it had solved the problem of minority underrepresentation.

In fact, its racialist war on standards only magnified its dilemmas. The SAT had once informed admissions officers not only about applicants' qualifications but also whether admitted students could do the work once enrolled.

But soon liberal professors learned that many of the newly admitted cohorts lacked the K-12 training necessary to do customary university coursework. Yet if professors maintained their regular courses, requirements, and grading, they might soon be labeled racists once particular minorities were shown to do less well than Asians and whites.

So universities inflated grades. They introduced new remedial and gut courses. And they reduced the required coursework. But again, racialism is never a solution to problems. Instead, it is a catalyst that fuels them - as we have seen with the new notion that plagiarism is not an actionable offense when the culprit can plead victim status, whether a former president of Harvard or a current professor at Cambridge. But there are ancient laws and norms that insist intellectual theft is a crime and should be punished, not rewarded or ignored.

Soon employers noticed that the reading, writing, and analytical skills of graduates from prestigious schools were proving dismal. Alumni complained both that the reputations of their almae matres were in decline and resting on the fumes of the past and that their own children, who had prepared diligently to ensure suitably competitive grades and SAT scores for admission, were being rejected solely on the basis of their race.

The Left likewise pushed for lower physical standards for the military's ground-combat brigades so that women, on average far less strong than their male counterparts, could join elite units. Again, the same ignorance and arrogance were evident. Physical standards were based on a century of combat experience in which morale, group discipline, and unit success rested on ensuring that all soldiers achieved a common level of physical strength and endurance.

This neo-Marxist-driven demand to mandate equality - albeit now substituting racial and gender consciousness for class consciousness - requires the destruction of established traditions, laws, and norms. The radical Left's key agendas - defunding the police, destroying the border, granting mass amnesties to illegal aliens, subsidizing wind and solar energy while waging a war on fossil fuels, and expanding racial essentialism in hiring and admissions - have never won more than 30 to 40 percent support among the general public. Yet the solution was not to ask why, and then to reflect, reboot, and recalibrate in order to discover how the Left had lost public support.

Instead, the solution was to alter or destroy the system that had denied them power.

So communists, socialists, and radical Democrats prefer moving the goalposts. When equality of opportunity was largely achieved, next they demanded a mandated equality of outcome.

With the ascendancy of a large, affluent middle class, the Left, in its eternal search for a victimized class, pivoted and replaced class oppression with racial victimization.

And when there were not yet enough victimized minorities to guarantee a majority constituency of the aggrieved, the Left redefined the victimized to include anyone who was not a white heterosexual male, regardless of income and privilege.

And when the people finally tired of the Leftists' totalitarian social engineering, the Left sought to change the system by radically altering the way Americans vote, the manner in which government is formed and functions, and, finally, the very demography of America.

The common denominator? Human nature revolts at forced statism, coercive redistribution, and government-mandated equality of results. It instead yearns for liberty and freedom.

No matter how much deception, camouflage, or brainwashing is employed, statism, socialism, and communism can never sustain public support. Throughout history, the Left has therefore begun by changing the rules and altering the demography - if not initially through changes to election rules, bureaucratic fiat, and biased court orders, then eventually through sheer violence.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004, and is the 2023 Giles O'Malley Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush, and the Bradley Prize in 2008.

Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 16:20

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