I like Bill Gates the philanthropist, though Bill Gates the extrepreneur was a real a-hole. Longreads put up a link to a Fortune profile about Bill Gates from 1986, when the 30-year-old tech titan was about to take Microsoft public. Here’s how writer Bro Uttal described Gates at the time:

“Money has never been paramount to this unmarried scion of a leading Seattle family, whose father is a partner in a top Seattle law firm and whose mother is a regent of the University of Washington and a director of Pacific Northwest Bell. Gates, a gawky, washed-out blond, confesses to being a ‘wonk,’ a bookish nerd, who focuses singlemindedly on the computer business though he masters all sorts of knowledge with astounding facility. Oddly, Gates is something of a ladies’ man and a fiendishly fast driver who has racked up speeding tickets even in the sluggish Mercedes diesel he bought to restrain himself. Gates left Harvard after his sophomore year to sell personal computer makers on using a version of the Basic computer language that he had written with Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. Intensely competitive and often aloof and sarcastic, Gates threw himself into building a company dedicated to technical excellence. ‘All Bill’s ego goes into Microsoft,’ says a friend. ‘It’s his firstborn child.””

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Microsoft in 1986: