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An emotional Bill Gates details his last visit with Steve Jobs

An emotional Bill Gates details his last visit with Steve Jobs

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gates 60 minutes (cbs)
gates 60 minutes (cbs)

The charitable work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the focus of the Microsoft founder’s recent 60 Minutes interview with Charlie Rose, but the longtime richest man in the world got emotional when the conversation turned to friend and rival Steve Jobs. When asked what the pair talked about during their final meeting at the Jobs home in May of 2011, Gates welled up, saying, “what we’d learned, families… anything.” He later went on to say that he and the Apple founder "practically grew up together."

In unaired footage from the interviews (above), Gates talked more about the visit, which was also the subject of an interview with Walter Isaacson for Jobs’s official biography. “He was not being melancholy, like ‘Oh, I’ve been gypped,’” said the Microsoft founder. “It was very forward-looking, like ‘Oh, we haven’t really improved education with technology yet — what do you think?’” In his conversations about the event with Isaacson, Gates had said that the men agreed that the field largely failed to benefit from the massive advancements in technology that reshaped things like law and medicine.

Not all of the conversation was similarly profound, however. Despite being severely ill, Jobs was engrossed in the plans for his 260-foot aluminum yacht, Venus, said Gates. Jobs “talked about looking forward to being on it, even though we both knew there was a good chance that wouldn’t happen,” he said.