“It’s easy to forget that Bill Gates wasn’t always so publicly revered. During the heyday of the PC revolution, he was the ruthless nerd-turned-tycoon who brutally and profanely berated underlings and allegedly tried to slash Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s equity in the company while he was undergoing cancer treatment in the early 1980s. (Gates has said his recollection of events differed from Allen’s.) Windows software, his flagship creation, was a buggy mess that frustrated millions of consumers, and Steve Jobs groused that Gates and his team showed “no shame” and “no taste” in ripping off Apple’s products. Even the judge who oversaw Microsoft’s crippling turn-of-the-century monopoly trial said Gates had “a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success.”