Bill Gates admired and envied Steve Jobs’ ability to captivate an audience, a new book says. Beck Diefenbach/Reuters; Mike Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and Apple cofounder Steve Jobs were two of the biggest tech CEOs of their time.
While they at times were both friend and foe, Gates admired and envied Jobs’ magnetism, a new book says.
Gates has previously said he was “jealous” of Jobs’ ability to captivate an audience.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were some of the most influential tech leaders of their time while at the helm of Microsoft and Apple respectively.
Gates has spoken of his admiration for Jobs’ magnetic persona and ability to woo a crowd, and a new book reveals further details about Gates’ envy of the late Apple cofounder.
The book, “BILLIONAIRE, NERD, SAVIOR, KING: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World,” out Tuesday from New York Times correspondent Anupreeta Das, gives some insight into that dynamic with an anecdote from a 1997 Macworld Boston event.
There, Jobs would announce Microsoft’s $150 million investment in Apple, a crucial lifeline for the company, which was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time. Gates, who “refused to travel to Boston to join Jobs onstage,” according to the book, appeared via satellite to give remarks.
“In August 1997, as Steve Jobs strode around the stage at Apple’s Macworld event in Boston, electrifying the audience with his forceful, clear, and magnetic delivery, Gates sat in one of Microsoft’s television studios thousands of miles away in Seattle, watching his nemesis,” the book reads.
“As he observed the loose-limbed ease with which Jobs spoke to the audience—the pauses at just the right moments, the speech dappled with humor, the sheer performative theater of it—Gates was filled with admiration and envy,” the account continues. “He turned to a colleague and asked: ‘How does he do that?,’ recalled a person who heard the exchange.”
A Bill Gates spokesperson told Business Insider of the new book, “Relying almost exclusively on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources, the book includes highly sensationalized allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts our office provided to the author on numerous occasions.”
Gates has said publicly before that, unlike himself, Jobs was a “natural” when it came to commanding an audience.
“It was always fun to watch him rehearse because part of his genius was, when he would finally do it, he would make it look like he’s just thinking it up right there,” he told Dax Shepard on the Armchair Expert podcast earlier this year. “I’ll never achieve that level.”
“He was such a wizard at over-motivating people — I was a minor wizard so I couldn’t fall under his spells — but I could see him casting the spells, and then I would look at people and see them mesmerized,” Gates added in the podcast. “I was so jealous.”
Gates and Jobs were, at times, friends, fierce competitors, and enemies over the years. Their relationship was a crucial factor to the success of Microsoft and Apple.
The Microsoft cofounder published a note to his blog following Jobs’ death in 2011, saying he was “truly saddened” to learn of his passing.
“Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives,” Gates wrote at the time.
“The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come,” he said. “For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.”
