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 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 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
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
Bill Gates' money has done more good for the world than anyone you've ever known, and nearly also everyone you've ever read about, combined.
Unfortunately, his foundations' spending also gives him an absurd amount of power and influence... which I suppose is great if you agree with what he thinks is good for the world.
Some of the uses of his money/foundation have done real good. Others have absolutely done real harm and/or just made him and his friends richer. Others expenditures are still are up for debate. He's got a fuckload of money so yeah, there is a lot of good but that's selection bias if you don't consider the bad.
Money going to a cause you like is good... but that money had to come from somewhere. If Bill robs Peter to cure Paul's malaria is Bill a hero, a villain, or a billionaire who thinks he knows what's good for the world and has the power and influence to just do it, or push someone else to do it, without consulting the unwashed masses who maybe have other priorities?
You can easily say that in an "absolute amount" sense, i.e. yes, I have not invested millions of dollars to help polio immunization or whatever.
But you got to look at the total - what about the billions of investments in oil companies etc? What about all the anti-consumer practices and exploitation of his owned companies? And so on with all the places the money arrived that was not charity? I have also not done these things.
I'm very sure all the bad things that happened with his money outweighs all the good things that has been done with his money. So someone without any assets at all, a baby born just a few minutes ago, in a total sense, "has done more good in the world than Bill Gates", because in total, Bill Gates has done much more bad things for the world than good.
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.
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.
It's quite literally not possible to be a nice guy and region billions of dollars in net worth. Social systems don't actually support that. I'm not talking about inheritance or marrying into it - if you are the fortunate maker, and the fortune is that big, you have to step on a lot of people to get there and more to stay there. Just depends how well you hide it.
Gates would insult employees but Jobs was legendary for screaming at his employees. But the worst is the stories that Woz tells about how bad Jobs was. Things like not giving stock to the very early Apple employees. He abandoned his daughter such that the mother and daughter were on welfare when he was worth millions.
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.
I see so many comments in here saying what a piece of shit he is and you're the only one to actually link something so i can appreciate that, but if this is it then i don't know what everyone is talking about.
Steve Jobs was also philanthropic, he just chose not to be vocal about it.
Bill doesn't come off as kind, rather amicable more than anything else. He knows how to shmooze. And constantly complaining about petty things, and still comparing himself to Jobs, in the news means he still can't let go of the past.
But I agree with you. As long as he's giving his money away for causes that benefit the public, I couldn't care less what kind of person he is.
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.
Don’t trust billionaires. Don’t trust the (bought and paid for) good press surrounding them. They didn’t get their billions being nice or looking out for the common man.
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.
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.
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.
Nice by oligarch standards. So maybe he's a slightly less huge asshole. But only because he mellowed with age. In his heyday he was every bit a robber baron, just like the others.
No that was intentional. He’s a fucking spin meister and disingenuous as hell. One of the most ruthless businessmen in history and apparently liked to fuck little girls. But if he acts sorry all is forgiven, right?
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.
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.
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 best part about Linux in 2023 is that MS is now entirely irrelevant in the desktop market space if you don't want to deal with them in any fashion, like me!
Stability? Drivers? Gaming? Emulation? VMs with QEMU? Containers? About the only thing Linux can't do is Adobe and even that is becoming irrelevant with some of the newer image editing software that isn't the tragedy that is Gimp.
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.
Do you have articles on Gates' work causing harm on the food sector? I'd love to learn more.
He had some valid reasoning behind preventing an open source covid vaccine. Whether it was the right call is up for debate.
The most prominent reason that stuck in my mind was to ensure the vaccines were of high quality and made using proper equipment. This is reasonable as a bad one could've drastically reduced trust among the general population.
He had some valid reasoning behind preventing an open source covid vaccine.
No. It's the exact same "valid" excuses billionaire parasites hide behind when they do their dirty work. His excuse is no more valid than "spreading civilization."
I’d like more details on your claim - from everything I read, Gates has aged well, or at least his image has. He was the Elon Musk of his age, but saner, the guy so many of us loved to hate, but extremely successful. He seems much more respectable in retirement, doing some good with his money,
Reading fawning PR does not equate to Gates "aging well."
He seems much more respectable in retirement, doing some good with his money,
All that this proves is that Bill Gates, the worst billionaire parasite of them all, has successfully camouflaged his history of parasitism - at least when it comes to people like you.
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.
He tries to be a regular guy, he just really can't because everybody knows his face. He's been known to occasionally show up waiting in line at a local burger joint, for example. Don't get me wrong--I'm not saying he's a regular guy. But he tries to live like a normal person to at least some degree.