- Bill Gates was told by Apple founder Steve Jobs he should have dropped acid to help make Microsoft products more interesting. Gates said taking recreational substances dulled his mind.
One might imagine that Bill Gates’s interactions with the late Steve Jobs revolved around emerging technologies, talent management, and economic outlooks—but it turns out hallucinogenic drugs were also a theme.
According to Gates, the Apple cofounder believed the Microsoft cofounder should have used acid when designing his computer products.
The billionaire tech titan worth $164 billion told The Independent in February: “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.”
Jobs was considered a visionary who revolutionized product design in the 1990s and 00s and elevated its importance in the tech industry through the launch of products like the iMac, iPod, iPad, and iPhone.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was busy building its cloud-computing software—still a major bastion of the $3.6 trillion company to this day—and rolling out office-friendly services like Word and Excel.
It seems that such innovations—and how they were subsequently presented to customers—didn’t impress Jobs much.
Gates said he replied to Jobs’ jibe with: “Look, I got the wrong batch.”
Gates explained: “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.”
The duo had something of a love-hate relationship while Jobs was alive, but Gates clearly admires the talents of his counterpart, adding: “[Jobs] wouldn’t know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing and things like that… I envy those skills. I’m not in his league.”
Jobs made his thoughts on Gates’ missed opportunity public, though it’s not clear if he ever addressed them directly to the Seattle-born Gates.
In 2011, Jobs told author Walter Isaacson: “[Gates would] be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
Gates on drug experiments in his youth
It seems that Jobs was unaware that Gates, 70, had used recreational drugs in his youth, with the father of three confirming he smoked marijuana in high school.
The interest was “not because it did anything interesting,” Gates told The Independent, but because “I thought maybe I would look cool and some girl would think that was interesting. It didn’t succeed, so I gave it up.”
The interest in recreational substances, he added, stemmed from optimism: “I’m willing to take risks, I tried a lot of things.”
However, when Gates began working on Microsoft in earnest alongside Paul Allen in his 20s, he stopped taking drugs.
“Another thing about my personality is that I like my mind to work and be very logical,” Gates explained. “So I stopped … because it made my mind sloppy, either during or the day afterwards.”
Read more on Bill Gates:
- Bill Gates believes Alzheimer’s blood tests should be part of routine medicals—such prevention means you could work into your 90s if you wanted to
- Bill Gates calls on Congress to ‘show its values’ on foreign aid, or this year will see children’s deaths go up instead of down
- The only person whose net worth has dropped anywhere near as much as Elon Musk’s is Bill Gates’—and he’s giving it away
This article was originally published on February 6, 2025.
