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.
Being better than Elon is a pretty low bar but, I suppose I’d agree he passed it
It’s like saying “I may be shit, but I’m not burning, sulfurous, liquid fire shits.” Dude is still shit.
yeah and jobs. he could throw bezos in there too.
Where?
steve jobs, jeff bezos. very low bars as well.
With Elon Musk having problems being nicer than Hannibal Lecter, the bar is indeed low.
Bill Gates is like that token villain lord whose heir has already replaced him and he’s grown to the age where he realizes no one will miss him after the life he’s led.
Bill just has a better publicist.
Correction: he HAS a publicist. Elon doesn’t.
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.
Yes, that is exactly it.
From a human standpoint, he is still a shit human.
But from a billionaire standpoint, he is at least somewhat human.
At least now, not so much in the past.
Hey, that’s not a nice thing to say about turds.
No one is the villain of their own story.
If Bill Gates was a good person he would already have given away his billions like Chuck Feeney rather than just talk about giving away the money.
You’re not fooling anyone Bill.
You’ll be eaten along with all the other billionaires, including ‘ole Musky.
Unlike them, he is at least working on giving his money away. And he has said in the past that the government should tax people like him more. There is a difference, even though I agree he shouldn’t be a billionaire, either.
Chop chop!
He doesn’t have billions under a mattress. Wealth is not money, you can’t give it away.
What about all the farmland he all of a sudden now owns which makes him the biggest private farmland owner in the US? Can you give that away?
Ok, tomorrow BG gives you a few acres of his land for free. What do you do next? How will that improve your life? I bet you know shit about farming.
Fuck off with that attitude, do you think bill gates personally farms all that farmland? Do you think he even has to know anything about it to own it and put it to use? What the fuck kind of argument is that, when the owner is a tech billionaire and not a farmer? How can you give him a free pass for that solely on the grounds of him being a billionaire, but criticize me for daring to say he maybe doesn’t need all that land?
Also I don’t have to be personally given anything from any single billionaire. We could try redistributing all that wealth from all billionaires between everyone and we’d all end up with like tree fiddy (well, more like less than 300 us dollars). That’s really not the point of criticizing obscene wealth accumulation. With that money they all get power, and they use the power to bend everything to their will in order to hoard more power. They don’t need any of it, but they keep hoarding it, at the cost of everyone from their own employers, to competitors, to everyone’s information, to the very legal systems and infrastructures of entire countries. And, as someone pointed out, they absolutely can and do occasionally turn part of that power into pure money for whatever reason they might need to, such as, oh idk, buying a 44bn dollar tech company as their personal toy. If that money, or that land, were in hands of non-profits or governments, you’d see very measurable results in quality of life improvements for societies all around the world. Maybe not flying car futuristic utopias like the Jetsons promised, but maybe, just maybe, we’d avoid looking like blade runner or cyberpunk dystopias.
You can’t redistribute wealth. Wealth is not money.
Sure most of his wealth, like every rich person is in stocks. I own some stocks too and I’m pretty sure I could sell them and have money in my bank account. That money could probably given away, although I’m no expert.
Elon buying Twitter in cash should have clued in even the densest what a bullshit lie that was, but here we are.
I still wonder if that was an accident. He declared something on Twitter, then a lawyer got through to him what the SEC could do to him if it were fraud
Selling large amounts of shares is not that easy. It can easily collapse the company. Also you need to sell to someone. Some people just want the rich to sell their shares, but if they all do, who will buy? Mmm? You? Can you buy 10% of Microsoft at will?
Yeah, sorry, that doesn’t work. Wealth is not money.
God I hate hearing this stupid fucking rhetoric. Jeff Bezos owns a yacht that’s literally too big to be serviced at most ports so he has yachts to keep his superyacht serviced. Stop acting like stock wealth isn’t tangible enough to be considered in the conversation. You’re not going to get any of their attention no matter how much you love licking their boots.
Not to mention Elon literally buying twitter so a kid could stop tracking his airplane.
Lol ok.
Just because something is not easy, doesn’t make it impossible. I have provided a very clear example of how wealth is in fact money, but you very obviously need to be right.
Because I am.
You might want to take a look at the other responses as well as mine. You might learn something.
Yeah, I learned that there are too many dumb people who don’t understand the basics.
I mean he did exactly that. He diversified his portfolio.
Microsoft stock is still going strong.
Steve Jobs is the best of all three of them. At least he had the decency to die.
Stupidly, no less.
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.
The only difference is I bet Bill Gates will taste better. Elon is obviously too stressed out and that ruins the meat.
Bill did some horrible shit in the past, especially during the start of Microsoft.
But these days he is trying to improve, which we should commend. He could just stayed an awful billionaire that used his money for evil instead of trying to eradicate smallpox.
His medical work is not commendable. Right now it’s almost impossible to do anything on the world stage without the foundation’s approval. This recent article has links to some issues. This older article highlights a bunch of problems that were highlighted during the ‘Rona vaccine process. Either you do what the foundation wants or you don’t do medicine. Even when you do what the foundation wants, you move capital and ownership up to the top (Gates was a huge proponent of the COVID vaccine IP). The foundation has done good things. The opportunity cost of the foundation is staggering.
But that goes against the narrative. We have to have a rich guy to contrast against Elon or the whole thing falls apart! Bill Gates is good even though everything points otherwise.
That’s a fair point! I really struggled for years with the “gates is cool because look at what he does for Reddit secret Santa” narrative.
He can get rid of his fortune any time he wants. If he’s trying to improve, he’s not trying very hard.
Well Elon Musk is basically a cartoon villain at this point so that’s not saying much
His mum already looks like one.
This could be the cover for a cyberpunk Far Cry 7
Or a new Hunger Games character
Yeah exactly. Sure, Gates clears the bar, but it was a very low bar.
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
I’m sure you’re right in some ways, but when your source is “Some guy’s YT channel”, nobody will take you seriously, except for other people that believe everything they see on YT
Yeah, you’re right. Hang on, I remember seeing a cool video about this…
You can find all the sources in the video description. I don’t see the video itself as a source, it’s a summary of many other sources.
Please link sources then, so we don’t have to watch a video.
Here’s the difference - ten minutes watching a video to find out the source was Fox News, or you posting a direct link so we just laugh at you
you can’t post links from youtube. google eats the full path
You can find all the sources in the video description. I don’t see the video itself as a source, it’s a summary of many other sources.
It would be nice if you could link some of these sources. There are a lot of people, myself included, who’d rather die than click someone’s YouTube link.
This shouldn’t need a source though, really. My source for knowing billionaire philanthropy is bullshit is “thinking about it for five seconds.”
I’m with Linky here. I’m not watching some twat asking me to smash like for source, fuck dat
You don’t have to watch.
Musk is not a tech leader, lol.
He’s a whiny piece of shit with an ego the size of the planet he wants to own, but sadly, he is a tech leader. Right now he controls the biggest EV charger network in the americas, most NASA contracts go to him, he’s got our skies covered in his satellites, and he owns [read: complete took a massive dump on] one of the primary social media platforms on the internet. He also did Kickstart the EV craze, probably influenced the price of solar in some way, and definitely influenced the price of lithium batteries. I hate him as much as anyone else (maybe more because I was a fanboy before the cave incident), but he’s, quite sadly, a tech leader.
Gates: “I’m at least 1% less evil than these two sociopaths.”
while hes not the greatest person, hes at least trying to be philanthropic and not just cartoony evil
You should probably look deeper into his philanthropy, it’s not as great as he claims. It showed especially during COVID.
In what way? He helped pay for millions of vaccines. Can’t get much better than that for a private citizen.
He’s still pretty much the same Bill Gates of the anti-trust deposition (if you never saw that video I highly recommend it).
The fact that this will not be remembered as part of Gate’s legacy makes my blood boil.
You could maybe Google it instead of asking, but here’s a starting point: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/07/how-bill-gates-makes-the-world-worse-off
what do you think trying means. someone whose trying doesn’t mean what theyre doing is sucessful
You think it’s just purely an accident that he kept becoming richer despite ‘giving away his fortune to charity’? The only thing he’s trying to do is lowering his tax bill.
I don’t even trust him like that, but people act like its entirely a binary thing whether hes purely good, or purely evil. how anyone could have read the original statement and assume I remotely think hes purely good is beyond me, hes just less evil than actually purely evil people who just spend their money solely on theirselves.
In many ways it would be better if he just spent money on himself. He’s pushing philanthropy that’s actually harmful (in the US he’s promoting charter schools, for example, to the detriment of the quality of education).
His influence in global health probably killed millions of people during the pandemic too by delaying the distribution of the Oxford vaccine in developing countries.
You’re just falling for the PR that philanthropy gives it’s users.
So do you believe he should have revoked all the money that was donated to something like malaria research?
Yes, and that would’ve gone to taxes instead.
He sort of is now. He sure wasn’t out to help society in the 80s and 90s.
He strikes me as an ordinary, if intelligent and ambitious, person. Which speaks as to the corrosive danger of that kind of power in any individual’s hands.
He’s come out and told people to stop telling him their next big tech idea went they greet him in public because if it’s good, he will use it.
We are grading.
On a hell of a curve.
“I’m not so bad, as serial killers go” is not a great defense.
My first though exactly. I agree with him, he is better. However more than zero isn’t a great measurement to hold yourself to.
