None of them killed anyone, did not rape anyone, beat anyone. They did not rob banks.

They are humans, that is their fault.

All their dark stories come down to one thing, they are all dicks, huge dicks.

Bill Gates tried to steal all the stocks and stock options from Paul Allen as Paul was sick with cancer and not thought that he would survive. He forced Apple to sell him Apple basic for Macintosh for $1 or he would stop making software for the machine, only to kill the project. There are many stories about Microsoft about to buy a company, does check out the company, get access to their source code and then cancel the deal only to give out almost identical apps later. Buying up competing companies just to close them down and more.

Steve Jobs did a phone prank to an Apple fan boy who applied for the Apple CEO position and told him that he had been chosen, later to tell him if he showed up at Cupertino that the cops would arrest him. Steve Jobs refused child support for his daughter Lisa. But he was 20 years old by then, not excusing what he did though. He later made good and Lisa choose to live with him instead of her mother. Steve did many things wrong as a 20 something. But The Original Macintosh (folklore . org) has a lot of stories that show him as a nice guy also, playing pranks with the team, breaking into his own office as he locked his keys inside. Putting a pirate flag on a building. All of the original mac team talked fondly about Jobs.

Mark pretty much stole facebook from his friends, plain and simple, got rid of people when they were no longer needed by him. Has been ordered again and again to pay huge sums to people after settling in court.

Elon Musk had a secretary who worked relentlessly for him, one day she asked for a raise, he told her to take a few days off, I will see if I can live without you. Then a few days later he called her and told her she was fired.

Linus Torvalds was speaking at a big gathering, asked how many subversion programmers were in the group, then when they raised their hands, he started screaming at them and calling them foul names like m*%”&”$”$”g idiots, Linus has a big vocabulary for worse words which I will not repeat here.

The Intel founders, some of them survived the holocaust against all odds, made shady deals, killed competition and promised to deliver things to stop other companies and then never delivering.

They are dicks, but they are also the people who will end up in history books. They have all made technology the way they are today. The world is a much better place because they are/were here. You could even argue that because they were dicks, did not care if they walked over other people, that’s why we have all the nice things we have now.

If you want the opposite (pretty much), have a look at Visicalc, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, by all accounts super nice people, treated everyone great, just all around nice nerds, they were trounced, not many people alive today who know who they are (yes they are both alive as I type this). A guy just took their idea, made his own version and had a ready version when the IBM PC was introduced.