Bill Gates Jokes About LSD Experimentation, Says Steve Jobs Took a 'Different Batch'

Gates joked that his "batch" of LSD made him trip about coding.

February 5, 2025

THE TONIGHT SHOW STARRING JIMMY FALLON -- Episode 2090 -- Pictured: Businessman Bill Gates during an interview on Tuesday, February 4, 2025.

Image via Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images

Bill Gates and Jimmy Fallon had some trippy talk about LSD and Steve Jobs during a chat this week on The Tonight Show.

Gates, 69, was on the talk show to discuss his new memoir, Source Code. Around the 4-minute mark of the video below, he mentioned Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who was a Jimi Hendrix fan.

The reference made Fallon think of Gates recounting Allen's LSD experience in Source Code.

"He made me do the same thing," Gates said.

After Fallon joked to the cheering audience that he didn't want his guest to have any "flashbacks," Gates said his acid trip was "a little crazy" and mentioned Jobs, the late Apple CEO.

"The funny thing was, later, when Steve Jobs was kind of denigrating me, he said, 'Oh, Bill Gates has no design taste. He should have taken acid,'" Gates said. "And I was like, 'Wait a minute. I took the acid. It was just, I got the batch
that's about code, not about design.'"

He added, "He got a very different batch than I did."

But don't expect Gates to recommend dropping acid, as the businessman called the trip "kind of fake."

"And I like it when my mind works well," he told Fallon. "And I was kind of worried afterwards. 'Did I mess up my mind and erase all my knowledge?' So even though I was a big risk-taker, then I thought, 'No, no more of that.
I'm gonna just work super hard.'"

Jobs, who famously said that taking LSD was a pivotal moment in his life, is quoted as saying in his 2011 biography that Gates, creatively, would have been a "broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."

In a recent interview with The Independent, Gates joked that Jobs simply had the "marketing-design batch," making the entrepreneurs dissimilar to each other.

"Because his talents and mine, other than being kind of an energetic leader, and pushing the limits, they didn't overlap much," Gates told the publication. "He wouldn’t know what a line of code meant, and his ability to think about design and marketing and things like that... I envy those skills. I'm not in his league."