Dying Steve Jobs kept Bill Gates’ letter at his bedside

When Steve Jobs was on his deathbed, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wrote him a letter, which ended up meaning so much to Apple’s visionary co-founder that he kept it next to his bed, it has been reported.

In his final months, it has emerged that Jobs, a huge critic of Gates’ ‘unimaginative’ character and for being someone who ‘ripped off other people’s ideas’, became an unlikely fan of the Microsoft co-founder, so much so that he kept a letter written by him on his deathbed.

A few months before Jobs passed away, Gates visited him at his home, where they spoke for hours about the past and the future. “We spent literally hours reminiscing and talking about the future,” Gates revealed in a recent interview with The Telegraph.

After the meeting, Gates said he wrote Jobs a letter telling him, “how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know.”

Steve Jobs was seemingly so touched by the letter that he kept it by his bedside during his last months even though his biography, which was published shortly after Jobs’ death, paints a rather unsociable image of the Microsoft boss.

Jobs’ biography, authored by Walter Isaacson, quotes the Apple co-founder as saying Gates is “basically unimaginative” and would “be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”

Laurene, Steve Jobs’ wife, called Gates after the book came out, to let him know how much his letter had meant to Jobs.

“She said ‘Look, this biography really doesn’t paint a picture of the mutual respect you had.’ And she said he’d appreciated my letter and kept it by his bed,” Gates said in the interview.

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