New book says Gates envied Jobs' charisma
2024-08-22
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Reference News reported on August 21On August 13, the US Business Insider website published an article titled "New Book Reveals Gates' Envy of Jobs' Appeal: 'How Did He Do It?'" by Sarah Jackson and Jordan Hart. The full text is excerpted as follows:
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were among the most influential technology leaders of their time when they ran Microsoft and Apple, respectively.
Bill Gates has spoken of his admiration for Steve Jobs' charisma and ability to engage an audience, and a new book provides more details on how Gates came to admire the late Apple founder.
New York Times reporter Anuprita Das's recently published book, Billionaire, Geek, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape the World, provides some insight into this using an anecdote about the 1997 Macworld Boston conference.
Jobs announced at that conference that Microsoft would invest $150 million in Apple, a crucial lifeline for Apple, which was then on the verge of bankruptcy. The book says Gates "refused to go to Boston to join Jobs on stage," and instead delivered the speech via satellite.
The book wrote: "In August 1997, Steve Jobs paced the stage of the Macworld Conference in Boston, his powerful, clear and charismatic speech enchanting the audience, while Gates sat in a studio at Microsoft in Seattle thousands of miles away, watching his powerful rival."
“Watching how Jobs spoke to the crowd with such ease — with just the right pauses, wit, drama — Gates was filled with admiration and envy,” the book says. One person who overheard the exchange recalled, the book says, “He turned to a colleague and asked, ‘How does he do that?’ ”
A spokesman for Bill Gates told the website that the new book "relies almost entirely on second-hand hearsay and anonymous sources, contains sensational assertions and outright lies, and ignores well-documented facts that our office has repeatedly provided to the author."
Gates has previously said publicly that, unlike him, Jobs was a "genius" at dominating his audience.
“It’s always fun to watch him rehearse because he has this knack for making it look like he’s doing it live when he’s actually giving the speech,” he told Dax Shepard on the “Armchair Expert” podcast earlier this year. “I could never get to that level.”
"He was this wizard who was good at over-motivating people - I was a junior wizard, so I wasn't mesmerized by him - but I could see that he was working magic, and then I saw that people were hypnotized. I was so jealous," Gates said on the podcast.
Over the years, Gates and Jobs were sometimes friends, sometimes fierce rivals and enemies. Their relationship was a key factor in the success of Microsoft and Apple.
After Jobs' death in 2011, the Microsoft founder wrote on his blog that he was "deeply saddened" to learn the news. "Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago and have spent more than half of our lives as colleagues, competitors, and friends," Gates wrote at the time.
He said: "The world rarely has an impact as profound as Steve's, and those impacts will be felt for many generations to come. For those of us who were lucky enough to work with him, it was a great honor. I will miss Steve dearly."
