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Bill Gates is, according to the Forbes real-time billionaire tracker, worth a cool $126,3 billion.

Much of that is down to the astronomical success of Microsoft, the company he co-founded, but credit should also be given to Michael Larson (above).

He heads up Cascade Investment, which is based in Washington, and oversees most of the personal wealth of Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as their foundation.

He’s done so for decades, operating with “an obsessive level of secrecy”  and “absolute discretion”.

As Bill’s philandering ways have been exposed over the past few weeks, along with his association with Jeffrey Epstein, so too have allegations against Larson.

A report by The New York Times shows that Larson has been the subject of allegations including racist remarks, showing nude pictures of women to his staff, and making sexist comments.

Let’s get the abridged version, via The Guardian:

Larson, who runs Cascade Investments, had created a “culture of fear” where the employee abuses had occurred…

[He] had “judged female employees on their attractiveness, showed colleagues nude photos of women on the internet and on several occasions made sexually inappropriate comments. He made a racist remark to a Black employee.”

It added: “He bullied others. When an employee said she was leaving Cascade, Mr Larson retaliated by trying to hurt the stock price of the company she planned to join.”

Sources also allege that Larson would call employees “stupid” and dub their work to be “garbage.”

The racist comment was directed towards former employee Stacy Ybarra, who told Larson she had voted before arriving at work one November:

In response, two sources say he responded by saying “but you live in the ghetto, and everybody knows that Black people don’t vote.”

Via Yahoo, there were also claims that he harassed a woman who managed a bike shop that was majority-owned by a Cascade-backed company:

The woman hired a lawyer in 2017 and wrote a letter to Gates and French Gates threatening to sue the couple if Larson’s alleged advances didn’t stop.

In the letter, the woman said Larson had told her he wanted to have sex with her as well as another woman, a source who read the letter told the Times…

[Bill] Gates’ solution was to pay the manager in a settlement, while [Melinda] French Gates suggested conducting an external review of the matter and of the work culture at Cascade…

A law firm brought in to investigate concluded the accusation couldn’t be substantiated, and Larson returned to work after a leave of absence.

In response to the report, a spokesman for Cascade said that during his long time at the helm, Larson has managed more than 380 people, and received fewer than five complaints.

Larson himself responded by saying that painting Cascade as a toxic environment “is unfair to the 160 professionals who make up our team and our culture”.

The Gates’ nightmare 2021 rolls on.

[sources:guardian&yahoo]