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.
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.
I mean he did exactly that. He diversified his portfolio.
Microsoft stock is still going strong.
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.
Why is Bill “patent troll vaccines and sell them through my charity” Gates called a philanthropist?
Because legacy media like business insider are complete suckers for the billionaire charity scam and by default worship the rich.
Compared to hitler I’m also a pretty nice guy
Signed: Mao Zedong
Idk that Mao can be compared positively to Hitler. China just quietly succeeds at genocide, authoritarianism, and mass deaths.
That’s the point? 😇
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.
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.
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.
Do you have articles on Gates’ work causing harm on the food sector?
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.”
Thanks!
That address is on the money. Bill should be funding local business in Africa directly for the most immediate impact in the region.
His current approach at best helps once the innovations become accessible.
I do agree with Gates in part that hunger is a production problem. Increasing supply lowers price, which would help with food accessibility. It’s not a silver bullet and has many blockers, like the issues mentioned in the address.
Bill should be funding local business in Africa
Bill shouldn’t be funding squat in Africa. It’s the continued looting and pillaging of Africa’s resources by colonizers like Bill - and the economic repression policies enabled by their cronies in the Global North’s political establishments - that is causing Africa’s problems.
I do agree with Gates in part that hunger is a production problem.
No. That’s a lie. It’s a distribution problem - something that capitalist parasites like Bill doesn’t want to talk about because it’s his class of racketeers that is profiting off all this constrained distribution. Africa has always produced more than enough foodstuffs.
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,
I’d like more details on your claim
from everything I read, Gates has aged well,
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.
Thanks for the info - btw the Wikipedia article on AFGRA covers the concern even better and is more up to date. Yes it seems like AFGRA missed its mark.
Looking at the Wikipedia article for the Gates foundation, i see the criticism section includes that plus a few more concerns, but im still left with the impression it is a huge force for improving the world. Of special note from the criticism section was a throw away line that the Gates Foundation is the second biggest donor to the World Health Organization (WHO) - that’s huge
but im still left with the impression it is a huge force for improving the world.
No. It isn’t. The capitalists that got us into this mess are, in no shape or form, a force for “improving” the world. They caused the mess we are in.
second biggest donor to the World Health Organization (WHO) - that’s huge
Oh, I’d say that’s huge. It means Bill Gates - a billionaire parasite patent racketeer turned neo-colonizer - is also a health czar.
As I said - he is the worst of them all.
Can Elon or Steve leap over an office chair from a standing position in one jump? Yeah, I didn’t fucking think so.
#80sGates4lyfeCan any of those guys get coked up and sweat through their shirt while jumping around on stage and screaming about developers, though? I think not.
Poor Ballmer. All geeked up and nowhere to go.
We need to start hitting people in the face with pies again. In case people forgot:
Steve Jobs gave us Pixar, though.
He was, by all accounts, an unmitigable disaster of a human. An asshole to swallow the sun, if you will.
He seems better. Than two of the worst human beings alive atm.
I like Gates, I’m really impressed by the positive effects of their foundation, but I don’t know enough to say those effects outweigh the negative.
Jobs died in 2011
Nah, they make small batches here and there. Just keep you ears peeled for articles like “New Apple factory will create 2,000 Jobs”.
My mistake, I was thinking of musk and bezos and should have made that clear.
I always found jobs irritating and delusional, but not really a bad person like bezos or musk
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.
I 100% guarantee the likes of Bezos and Zuckerberg will try to emulate Bill’s philanthropist PR strategy when they get old
One certainly hopes. That would be amazing.
the Chan Zuckerberg foundation exists. Bezos probably has a volcano lair somewhere he calls the Bezos Foundation.
I’m not defending anything Zuck has done, but he’s closest to following in Bill’s footsteps.
Steve Jobs is the best of all three of them. At least he had the decency to die.
Stupidly, no less.
Bill just has a better publicist.
Correction: he HAS a publicist. Elon doesn’t.
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
Bill Gates has done more good for the world than anyone you’ve ever known, and nearly also everyone you’ve ever read about, combined.
Until you can beat that one-line argument, your entire line of reasoning is meaningless
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.
But you got to look at the total - what about the billions of investments in oil companies etc?
I fail to see how this is a problem at all. It’s a sound investment.
What about all the anti-consumer practices and exploitation of his owned companies?
Exploiting his own companies? Can you elaborate?
I don’t see how any of this “bad” at all outweighs the good of convincing billionaires worldwide to donate and fund NGOs until they are not billionaires any more.
Isn’t that exactly what people here clamor for?
If I “donate” 12 billion dollars and use it to buy stocks in the company I personally own that made all that money - would you say my concern is funding good cause NGOs until I’m no longer a billionaire or am I just dodging taxes?
Also, if he’s so adamant about giving away his wealth, why does it keep increasing? No way he’s actually more concerned about getting an ROI than his most noble goal of helping others through his “philanthropy”…
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?
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
Do you know what a description is?
Yes but I’m not clicking a YouTube link to find it
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.
deleted by creator
Was probably a middle management thing.
Having good PR a good person does not make.
No, but given Musk’s tantrums, there’s something to be said regarding listening to the good PR
And…. Not firing said good pr….
