(By Huffington Post)

“He and I, in a sense, grew up together,” Gates said. “We were within a year of the same age, and we were kind of naively optimistic and built big companies, and achieved all of it. Most of it as rivals, but we always retained a certain respect, communication.“

While CBS’s Charlie Rose spent the majority of his talk with Bill Gates discussing his charitable work curing diseases and making toilets, the “60 Minutes” segment on Sunday eventually turned to the Microsoft co-founder’s tumultuous relationship with that other great tech co-founder, Apple’s Steve Jobs.

“He and I, in a sense, grew up together,” Gates said. “We were within a year of the same age, and we were kind of naively optimistic and built big companies, and achieved all of it. Most of it as rivals, but we always retained a certain respect, communication.”

This is hardly the first time an interview with Gates has turned toward Apple. Segments on “Nightline” and “The Colbert Report” went there, too. But even as the relationship between the Microsoft and Apple co-founders — which involved a lot of lawsuits and name-calling — softened as the two got older, Jobs still wasn’t above stiffing Gates on a dinner date planned sometime before the Jobs’ death in 2011. “He said to my secretary, ‘If he wants to know why, tell him I’m an asshole,'” Gates said, laughing. “He was sick, but it was kind of classic.”

Still, Gates talked warmly of Jobs. As previously reported in the Walter Isaacson biography, Gates did eventually meet with Jobs before his passing, and got emotional talking to Rose about it. “He was not being meloncholy, like, oh I’ve been gypped,” Gates said. “It was very forward-looking about how we haven’t really improved education with technology yet.”

(Source: Huffington Post)

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