Bill Gates thinks of himself as 'very nice' compared to Elon Musk and Steve Jobs

ironsoap@lemmy.one to News@lemmy.world – 259 points – Bill Gates thinks of himself as 'very nice' compared to Elon Musk and Steve Jobs
businessinsider.com

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.

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Now yes, he is. Bill was a fucking asshole and a total sociopath not too long ago.

still is, in fact. the philanthropy is basically morality banking- and it's peanuts to what he could be doing.

also, it's a great way to dodge taxes and still be able to buy shit.

That's . . . that's not how charitable donation writeoffs work.

Really, this whole comment is a terminally-online trainwreck.

That’s not the tax dodge.

The foundation is its own 501c non profit, they donate to it, put their money into the trust fund.

The trust fund then turns and invests all that cash thst they donated and make bank while paying back “costs” for whatever. The only tax that gets paid is personal income taxes on the salaries paid out.

Which are much reduced because the fund also pays for things like hotels and rentals and travel

What the foundation then gives out, they were going to give out anyhow so as to whitewash their reputation and make themselves feel good

Source? Or is this just speculation

It's exactly how it works. You calculate what your tax bill will be, and instead of paying it in taxes where the government decides what to do with the money (in theory democratically, in practice it's different obviously, see point #6), it goes into a charity in your name.

Then you use this charity for multiple things:

  • Free PR, as you don't need to use your own money, you use the money that otherwise went to taxes. The headline is X donates $N billion to charity, you look so giving, even though it's money you wouldn't have been able to keep any other way.
  • Your foundation donates to prestigious academic institutions. That's something that you can parlay into a board seat or at least influence. Now you can decide what this institution will do. In Bill Gates' case, he used his influence to make sure the Oxford vaccine wasn't open sourced, but instead licensed. This delayed the response in the developing world by a year or so, and made sure that the pharmaceutical industry made even more money than they even made otherwise. Oh, and Bill Gates privately (on the non-charity side), owns a bunch of pharma stock.
  • speaking of academic institutions: you buy a fancy building for their economics department. Suddenly the whole field of economics is basically limited to professors teaching trickle down economics. Marx' analysis of economics is considered fringe, and MMT as well.
  • your foundation throws parties fundraisers where you get to hang out with important people. Catering, venue, entertainment, etc is paid for by your charity. The people donating to your charity are using their own charities to do so, it's just one big circlejerk with free money that would've gone to taxes instead.
  • you get to circumcise a bunch of African men for dubious reasons and people will think you're awesome
  • your foundation can donate to politicians or political organisations that will advocate for things you want. The things you want are deregulation, less taxes, etc. This in turn benefits you personally again on the non-charity side.

They donate to their foundations. Their foundations are only required to use ~5% of their assets for actual charity.

Private foundations are required to spend annually a certain amount of money or property for charitable purposes, including grants to other charitable organizations. The amount that must be distributed annually is ascertained by computing the foundation’s distributable amount. The distributable amount is equal to the foundation’s minimum investment return with certain adjustments.

...

The minimum investment return for any private foundation is 5 percent of the excess of the combined fair market value of all assets of the foundation

These are actual IRS links.

So these foundations are free to invest 95% of the money into whatever they want and only 5% into charity. And this data is partially open, they invest into oil, pharma, finance etc.

What is not open but very likely happening, is private talks behind the scenes about what these 95% should be invested in based on personal motivations/goals of these billionaires, i.e. just doing with their money what they want anyway, just in a tax-free way.

You're extrapolating from limited data and assuming the worst. You are the problem here.

The only thing I "extrapolated" is to assume that the 95% of money that they are actually free to invest wherever is essentially being decided by their whims. Sure, this might not be completely true, but let's say you assume that "extrapolation"/assumption is not the case.

As I said, the 5% charity requirement, 95% whatever is definitely true, that's why I even provided the IRS links, i.e. the actual tax institution governing these foundations. You can also see all the worst companies you can think of are being invested in, this is open data. There are also so many "very likely conflict of interest donations" it's hard to not "assume the worst" - like for example Gates donating large sums to the private school their children attend, investing in big pharma that are directly responsible for the huge price of vaccinations his foundation tries to make available...

These (and you can find more if you search) are not speculations/"extrapolation", these are things that provably happen. Of course it's possible to construct "good" reasons on why these "coincidences"(or whatever) keep happening, but the huge volume of these things where you have to try to come up with "good explanations" is just unreasonably high.

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