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.
He doesn’t have billions under a mattress. Wealth is not money, you can’t give it away.
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.
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.
Wait, so you really think everyone who has proven you wrong here is actually incorrect and you’re the only smart one in this thread? Have you heard the expression “If it smells like shit everywhere you go it’s probably you?” Surely you can see how it applies.
Mate, go to school.
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.