And he nearly Zuckerberg'd Paul Allen out of his share of the company while Paul was dealing with Cancer. He was laughing about it with his total fuckup of a buddy Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen caught him. Gates was never anything more than a cheat and a monopolist and all of his products outside of operating systems and Microsoft Office were flops. He then put his worthless fuckup of a buddy in charge in Ballmer who did nothing for 15 years with the company while Apple and Google grew exponentially. Comparing Gates to Musk is a fucking joke, as Musk revolutionized the world with Paypal, electric cars which noone thought were viable before he came along and restored Americans to the tippy top of space with SpaceX after NASA, politicians and corrupt arms contractors massively failed the American people.

Allen, 58, says he overheard a heated conversation between Gates and now Chief Executive Steve Ballmer in December 1982, shortly after Allen told them he was thinking of leaving the company.

"It was easy to get the gist of the conversation," writes Allen in the memoir as reproduced in Vanity Fair. "They were bemoaning my recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders. It was clear that they'd been thinking about this for some time."

Allen, who at that time was receiving treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer, and was scaling back his work at Microsoft, says he later received apologies from both Gates and Ballmer over the incident.

Allen, who made up the name Microsoft, co-founded the company with Gates in 1975. Two years later, he and Gates agreed to take 36 and 64 per cent shares in the company respectively, Allen says in the book, owing to Gates' greater contribution to their first coding job for the new Altair computer, which turned out to be the company's first big break.

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/how-bill-gates-tried-to-cheat-me-microsoft-cofounder-20110331-1cgu3.html