The Microsoft co-founder's wild lifestyle was well known among his inner circle — but newspapers like the New York Times hid the unflattering reports to continue getting "spoon-fed stories," James Wallace wrote in the 1997 biography, "Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace."

They "didn't report on the wild bachelor parties that Microsoft's boyish chairman would throw in his Seattle home, for which Gates would visit one of Seattle's all-nude nightclubs and hire dancers to come to his home and swim naked with his friends in his indoor pool," Wallace wrote.

It was a continuation from his time at Harvard, where he "did like to frequent Boston's notorious Combat Zone, with its porn shows, strip joints, and prostitutes," Wallace wrote.