The 69-year-old Microsoft co-founder admitted he was jealous of the former Apple head - who passed away in 2011 aged 56 - for having an “intuitive sense” for creating products with user-friendly designs, such as the iPhone.

Appearing on Yahoo Finance’s ‘Opening Bid’ podcast, Gates said: “Steve was very different than I was, I mean, in terms of intuitive sense of a good user interface, and how you do design. He had that and I didn't — I envy how genius he was at that.”

Even so, the tech boss said his former rival’s biggest weakness was his lacking knowledge of source code, though conceded Jobs had the “amazingly good” ability to choose people to fill in the areas he was unfamiliar with.

He continued: “But he was not an engineer. He would not know what source code was. He didn't really know about chip design, although his ability to pick people who worked in those areas was amazingly good.”

Gates added Jobs had learned a considerable amount about engineering from him and his Microsoft teams.

He said: “Steve would say something like, okay, I don't want any software to have manuals, which, okay, that's a nice thing to say. But actually we still did need to have help and some documentation. So we got kind of the best of both worlds where he would push, and I had engineering teams that we really had to do the work.”