Bill Gates thinks of himself as 'very nice' compared to Elon Musk and Steve Jobs
Bill Gates thinks of himself as 'very nice' compared to Elon Musk and Steve Jobs
Bill Gates says a certain level of intensity is necessary in creating innovative companies like Microsoft.
Bill Gates name-checked Elon Musk and Steve Jobs during a fireside chat on Thursday. The Microsoft founder said he considers himself "very nice" compared to his fellow tech leaders. But Gates acknowledged that a certain level of intensity is required in innovative fields. Bill Gates said he considers himself a more relaxed boss than many of his tech compatriots at the top.
The Microsoft founder name-checked Elon Musk and Steve Jobs during a fireside chat on Thursday after being awarded the Peter G. Peterson Leadership Excellence Award by the Economic Club of New York.
The talk's moderator asked Gates about the lessons he learned in creating a culture of innovation during his time at the helm of Microsoft.
The billionaire, who co-founded the technology company with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975, said leaders like himself have to think about how "hardcore" they should be when spearheading innovative companies.
"Everybody is different. Elon pushes hard, maybe too much," Gates said, referencing Musk. "Steve Jobs pushed hard, maybe too much."
"I think of myself as very nice compared to those guys," he added with a laugh.
Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, while Musk is the founder and SpaceX and the Boring Company, and cofounder of OpenAI and Neuralink.
Gates has a checkered history with both men. He and Jobs nursed a decades-long love-hate relationship, going from allies to rivals and back again several times. Their back-and-forth competitive spirit is often credited with spurring major innovations at both Microsoft and Apple over the years.
Steve Jobs Bill Gates Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Beck Diefenbach/Reuters; Mike Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times
After Jobs died in 2011, Gates said he respected the Apple founder and was grateful for their competition.
The philanthropist's relationship with Musk has been even more turbulent in recent years. The two men have publicly poked at each other and frequently disagree on everything from space travel to climate change.
Gates told Musk's biographer, Walter Isaacson, that the Tesla CEO was "super mean" to him in 2022.
"Once he heard I'd shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he's super mean to so many people, so you can't take it too personally," Gates told Isaacson.
But Gates acknowledged during the Thursday discussion that a "certain intensity" is required to succeed as an innovative leader.
"In my 20s, I was monomaniacally focused on Microsoft," he said. "I didn't believe in weekends or vacations.'
The moderator asked Gates to confirm an urban legend that has circulated in recent years in which the billionaire memorized all of his employees' license plates during the early days of Microsoft so he could track who was putting in long hours at work.
"It wasn't that many license plates. We only had a few hundred employees," Gates said, seemingly confirming the tale.
"I can still tell you when they came in and out," he added.
Gates cites his intensity with the "positive experience" he had at Microsoft, which he said still guides his thinking today.
"I view every problem through this innovation lens," he said.
When you've spent literally decades trying to bury your past self with philanthropic acts and good PR, it becomes quite easy for people to think you're at least nicer than the steaming turd in a dumpster fire that is Elon Musk.
Gates may be nice compared to some of his billionaire compatriots, but understand that's a very low bar to pass.
Bill Gate's PR is so good. Uses his foundation to dodge tax, prevents vaccines patents from being opened up for anybody to use, and people love him for it.
He's a piece of shit just like Musk, Bezos, and Jobs.
I 100% guarantee the likes of Bezos and Zuckerberg will try to emulate Bill's philanthropist PR strategy when they get old.
Bill Gates and all of his billionaire friends can go fuck themselves. Billionaire philanthropy is the biggest lie of this century, this is a great video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH4uh8cHuto
If you put the general noncery and the Linux circlejerking aside, and just take it at face value, it's still absolutely not true.
Back in the day, Bill Gates was infamous for being a jerk during reviews of services. I remember Joel Spolsky calling out the infamous BillG Reviews in a post of his, and there were several instances where others had said they'd been verbally insulted or just fired for getting something wrong. There are probably still plenty of stories around online of Gates losing it with entire rooms of people, cancelling 3+ year projects he didn't personally like, or making unreasonable demands because he was in a bad mood.
Don't get me wrong, Jobs and Musk are cunts too, but Gates wasn't any better.
Nah, he's just used more of his money to whitewash his image with articles such as this. When you peek behind the curtain, he's just as ruthless as the others.
In his book, "Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft," Allen writes that in 1982, he overheard Ballmer and Bill Gates discussing a plan to reduce Allen's 36 percent stake in Microsoft shortly after Allen was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Gates is a bad person. And I have no care about his hot take on himself.
Bill just has a better publicist.
Correction: he HAS a publicist. Elon doesn't.
No one is the villain of their own story.
Space Karen is a large steaming pile of shit, and while I agree with Bill that currently he is a smaller steaming pile of shit than Space Karen, that is a low bar to pass.
Bill you keep using the word “nice”. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
Bill Gates is a master of corporate blunt force, but also knows the absolute power of having PR make you appear friendly, harmless and mandane.
Jobs basically offed himself so it's difficult to compare to him. Elon Musk is one of the biggest pieces of shits there is so I'm not sure that says much by comparing to him.
While I would not say Bill is a terrible person, he has done some very problematic shit in the past.
The only difference is I bet Bill Gates will taste better. Elon is obviously too stressed out and that ruins the meat.
Okay, with Musk, the bar feels extremely low to clear on being a better person, especially after telling advertisers who chose of their own free will to leave twitter/x to go fuck themselves.
Ill give him that he seems nice. But nice isn't about substance, nice is the wrapping paper. To say one is a good person on substance is to call them kind, different than nice. Same way people will tell you a lot of Southerners can be very very nice, but very unkind at the same time.
He's also comparing himself against some of the lowest bars for this metric so that's also saying a lot on the claim as a whole.
The Tech Won't Save Us podcast very recently did a great in depth and nuanced episode that heavily criticizes The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
It's a really amazing podcast imo, and this one in particilar was a great listen. Highly recommended.
But if you want a shorter video format that focuses more on The Gates foundation's influence on the US school system, then I highly recommend taking a look at The Hated One's youtube video on the subject.
Bill Gates is far, far worse than Musk and Bezos put together.
Unlike Musk and Bezos, Gates literally stole an open-source vaccine away from the world while it was in the midst of a fucking pandemic. Musk and Bezos doesn't actually pose a clear, present and direct threat to 3rd world food security - unlike Gates with his attempts to enforce privatized monocropping on societies that are already desperately food insecure.
Of all the "celebrity" billionaire parasites, Gates is by far the worst - he is pretty much the Cecil John Rhodes of our era, and, unlike that vile colonizer, his evil isn't merely limited to one continent.
I think this is relatively a new line. I don’t remember him being talked about as a hard ass boss back then.
The media spun him as a techno whizz kid .