Bill Gates' confession about Steve Jobs that no one expected: He told me I should try it

Bill Gates says his decades-long tech rival, the late Steve Jobs, once told him Microsoft’s products would have benefited if Gates had experimented with psychedelic drugs.

What Jobs didn’t realize is that Gates had in fact tried LSD on more than one occasion by that point - experiences that the 69-year-old has recounted in his new memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, which was released earlier this year.

“Look, I got the wrong batch”

Speaking to the U.K. newspaper The Independent last month, Gates recalled: “Steve Jobs once said that he wished I’d take acid because then maybe I would have had more taste in my design of my products.

“My response to that was to say, ‘Look, I got the wrong batch.’ I got the coding batch, and this guy got the marketing-design batch, so good for him!

“Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn’t overlap much.”

Two contrasting giants of the tech world

College drop-outs who in the 1970s set up the tech giants Microsoft and Apple, respectively, Gates and Jobs have both been crucial influences on the growth of information and communication technology since the late 20th century.

“The stories of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are ultimately one story - it is the story of the personal computer, its software, and its impact upon society,” say Harvard Business School experts Anthony Mayo and Mark Benson.

However, while Microsoft and Apple are both dominant in the ICT landscape - they are the world’s top two tech firms by market capitalization, per Investopedia - they are also two very different brands with very different men at the heart of their enormous success.

“He was never an engineer”

Under Jobs, who died of cancer in 2011, Apple developed into a firm that sought to entice customers with product designs that are generally considered slicker and sleeker than Microsoft’s. In the California native, moreover, Apple boasted a chairman and CEO who was a much more polished public communicator.

Indeed, Gates saw Jobs “more as a salesman than a real tech leader”, explains the Business Insider journalist Jordan Hart.

In an interview with Axios last month, Gates emphasized his view that his business rival boasted far inferior technological expertise, by comparing Jobs’ abilities to those of his Apple co-founder, Steve “Woz” Wozniak: “[Jobs] was never an engineer. Woz was a real engineer - I mean, a hardcore engineer.”

Speaking to The Independent, Gates added: “[Jobs] wouldn’t know what a line of code meant."

Gates also admitted, however: “[Jobs'] ability to think about design and marketing and things like that... I envy those skills. I’m not in his league.”

And Gates’ awareness that Jobs possessed a superior ability to connect with the public is illustrated in another recent book on the Microsoft co-founder, an excerpt of which was published by Business Insider in August.

“How does he do that?”

In her book Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World, the New York Times journalist Anupreeta Das writes: “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.

“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.

“He turned to a colleague and asked: ‘How does he do that?,’ recalled a person who heard the exchange.”

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