During the nineties and early 00s he was a pretty maligned figure (exhibit 1) in most tech circles so, beyond his nerd-looking cutthroat COE figure he wasn’t known at all.

Then he went into a huge massive PR campaign that turned his image into this billionaire messiah bound to fix the world with his impossibly smart brain and his bottomless wallet.

And suddenly, everyone considered him an ubergenius that “invented” MSDOS, and Excel, and Powerpoint and now he’s using that force for Good™.

Meanwhile the old greybeards of yore remember how hated he was, how all these products were merely bought or acquired, and how terrible has been his true son (MS Word) all along. Because even though he had a 1590 SAT score and the fastest pancake sorting algorithm his accomplishments amount to being a shitty CEO.

But we can always thank him for Copilot™ (yep, he pushed hard for it).

Also as a way to understand what kind of bastard he is:

“In the early 1980s, while business partner Paul Allen was undergoing treatments for cancer, Gates—according to Allen—conspired to reduce Allen’s share in Microsoft by issuing himself stock options.”