Haha. You'll want to read the story of what he actually did before making this assumption. If the names were redacted from the Bill and Melinda story, everyone here would be calling for his head.
I can't find anything other than that he awkwardly asked her out (after dating a number of Microsoft employees). Most of the recent stories read like sanitized rewrites of history.
But I did find this somewhat interesting 1995 history of the lengths they went to in order to protect their privacy:
He cornered her in the parking lot after watching her for several weeks and asked for her number. She said no, mentioning something about him not being spontaneous enough. She didn't give him her number.
An hour later he called her at home, having obtained her number through her personnel information, saying, "Is this spontaneous enough for you?"
This is the wealthy CEO talking to a junior new hire.
I can only imagine the mob if someone like Travis Kalanick did that.
According to the standard some posters here are advocating, that makes Bill an evil sociopathic predator that should have been shamed or even locked up for harassment.
Clearly, these simple Dos and Donts are not so simple. It turns out that he made the correct move, they fell in love, and are married to this day.
Had I been his wing man and he bounced that plan off of me, I'd have talked him out of it and said he was crazy. It makes you wonder if he was extremely socially retarded or extremely socially advanced. He took a risk and it worked out perfectly for both of them.
Yet we want to crucify the guy who joked about wanting to hit on someone in an interview. I don't think that was appropriate but I'd be lying if I said I could find where we are drawing the line between what Dave tried and what Bill tried.
A 34 year old CEO asking a newly hired 23 year old college grad out on a date sounds like sexual harassment to me even if it was just a one time thing.
It certainly raises some interesting quid-pro-quo questions. Every sexual harassment training I've attended has mentioned this as very dangerous territory, but not explicitly sexual harassment.
If a CEO asked a much younger employee out and it made her so uncomfortable that she quit would you still say that it wasn't sexual harassment? Once is still too much. And for all we know Melinda might have felt compelled to say yes to avoid retaliation and only later accepted it.
