No, Chelsea Clinton didn’t tweet this about Bill Gates

Recent news reports have revealed that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates had an affair with an employee in 2000. But what looks like an oblivious tweet from Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former President Bill Clinton, who had his own workplace affair, is fake.

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"The more I hear about Bill Gates behavior the more ashamed for him I feel," reads what looks like a screenshot of a tweet from Clinton’s verified Twitter account. What kind of man pursues a physical relationship with an underling and has relations with her in their office???"

We searched Clinton’s Twitter account for mentions of Gates and found none that resemble the tweet in the Facebook post, though she has mentioned him about 10 times over the years, including a November 2013 tweet promoting a Wired magazine story about "the ‘Bills’ — my father @BillClinton and @BillGates." 

We also looked more broadly online for credible evidence that Clinton sent this tweet and we found none. Ordinarily if someone tweets something and then deletes it, there are still traces of the scrubbed message in Google search results, but that’s not the case here. 

Doctored tweets are not uncommon. If a public figure like Clinton had actually said this about Gates, someone she has praised in the past, it would likely have drawn widespread news coverage but, like the tweet, that doesn’t exist either. 

We rate this post Pants on Fire.