Bill Gates “refused to travel to Boston to join Jobs onstage” and appeared via satellite to give remarks, a book claimed.

Bill Gates has often spoken about Steve Jobs and his working style as the Microsoft boss said that he was in awe of the late Apple cofounder. A new book revealed details about Bill Gates’ envy of Steve Jobs. Throwing light into the dynamic, the book “BILLIONAIRE, NERD, SAVIOR, KING: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World” by New York Times correspondent Anupreeta Das shared an anecdote from a 1997 Macworld Boston event. Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, speaks during the 2024 CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, Texas.(Bloomberg)Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, speaks during the 2024 CERAWeek by S&P Global conference in Houston, Texas.(Bloomberg)

At the time, Steve Jobs was set to announce Microsoft’s $150 million investment in Apple but Bill Gates “refused to travel to Boston to join Jobs onstage” and appeared via satellite to give remarks.

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“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,” the book reads.

It added, “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.”

Bill Gates has said publicly that Steve Jobs was a “natural” when it came to commanding an audience.

“It was always fun to watch him rehearse because part of his genius was, when he would finally do it, he would make it look like he’s just thinking it up right there,” he said earlier, adding, “He was such a wizard at over-motivating people — I was a minor wizard so I couldn’t fall under his spells — but I could see him casting the spells, and then I would look at people and see them mesmerized. I was so jealous.”