Bill Gates reflects on relationship with Steve Jobs and their last meeting [video]

9to5 Staff | Jan 25 2012 - 6:10 am PT

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The Steve Jobs segment begins at mark 3:35. Flashless version is here.

Microsoft cofounder and former CEO Bill Gates sat for an interesting interview with Yahoo! and ABC News. The public face of Microsoft responded to a wide range of questions, including those touching on his final conversation with Steve Jobs and how his passing affected him. Contrary to the popular belief, the two Silicon Valley luminaries kept in contact with each other throughout their respective careers. What were the topics of their friendly chats?

He and I always enjoyed talking. He would throw some things out, you know, some stimulating things. We’d talk about the other companies that have come along. We talked about our families and how lucky we’d both been in terms of the women we married. It was great relaxed conversation.

How did Jobs’ death affect Gates? Read on…

Well, it’s very strange to have somebody who’s so vibrant and made such a huge difference and been … kind of a constant presence, to have him die. It makes you feel like, ‘Wow, we’re getting old.’ I hope I still have quite a bit of time for the focus I have now, which is the philanthropic work. And there’s drugs we’re investing in now that won’t be out for 15 years — malaria eradication, I need a couple of decades here to fulfill that opportunity. But, you know, it reminds you that you gotta pick important stuff, because you only have a limited time.

Walter Isaacson quoted Gates in the official Steve Jobs biography as claiming Jobs “said a lot of very nice things about me,” while noting that he also said “a lot of tough things.” Unlike Gates’ philanthropy work through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Jobs was not much of a philanthropist himself. According to the just released book “Inside Apple” by Fortune’s Senior Editor-at-large Adam Lashinsky, Jobs argued privately that “the most philanthropic action Apple could take was to increase the value of the company to share-holders could give away their wealth to causes of their choice, not Apple’s.”