- He’s a billionaire.
- Cheated on his wife.
- Travelled to Epstein’s Island.
- Got removed from Microsoft for propositioning female employees for sex
- Used Microsoft’s market position to kill off any competition. Remember Netscape?
- His foundation pushed hard to make the COVID vaccines intellectual property of drug manufacturers so they would get richer, leaving the world dependent on them for doses instead of allowing everyone to produce it.
He’s really awful too, or at the very least he used to be.
He’s done a lot of rebranding himself as being a great guy as of late, and put his money towards some great causes.
But when he was in charge of Microsoft he’d openly treat people like shit, openly steal things, openly do anticompetitive and illegal business practices, deliberately put small companies out of business, and openly bribe politicians to look the other way as he built his illegally-gained business empire.
The technology landscape today is vastly more closed and monopolised because of his/MS’s actions.
All the recent stuff is him trying to whitewash his image so he isn’t remembered as the bastard he is. Unfortunately, it’s working.
If you accept his research money (which people don’t seem to do anymore) there are so many strings attached that if you find something you’ll probably be liable even if you give it all up for free.
I’m still waiting for something good coming out of his pocket money spendings for good causes.
With money he got from a monopoly, meaning the money he took plus the deadweight loss are even worse for humanity. Computers would be even better today if it wasn’t for him, and we would’ve produced better things than we have today.
Monopolists “giving back” is insidious because it’s much easier to see what they gave us than what they took away.
I agree with you but he’s not on the same page as Steve Jobs, not in my book. Billionaires can’t exist in a fair system so they’re existence isn’t justified but comparatively speaking he is better than Jobs
We may have better computers but Malaria may be more of an issue, whereas without Jobs nothing of note would be missing other too many biopics.
The standardization of operating systems was an important step though. If there were hundreds of different OS’s on the market, then the PC generation would have stalled. The fact that there were basically only three dominant platforms meant that we could have market stability.
