“I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I’m a minor wizard, the spells don’t work on me,” said GatesEven when he failed, he succeeded, Gates said, citing the 1988 introduction of NeXT, the computer that “completely failed, it was such nonsense, and yet he mesmerized those people.”
“I have yet to meet any person who” could rival Jobs “in terms of picking talent, hyper-motivating that talent, and having a sense of design of, ‘Oh, this is good. This is not good,’ ” Gates said.
While it’s easy for leaders to “imitate the bad parts of Steve,” said Gates, who described Jobs as an “asshole” at times, “he brought some incredibly positive things along with that toughness.”Reflecting on the culture he created in the 1970s as Microsoft Corp. co-founder, Gates said the company in its early days had “a self-selected set of people who were mostly males, I’ll admit, and yes we were pretty tough on each other. And I think sometimes that went too far.”