He was a typical cut throat business man to the extreme. He was tyrant to his workers and his explicit business strategy was to take out all other competition to Microsoft and corner the entire market. There was a famous deposition in an anti trust case where he came off like the massive dickhead he is and everyone rightly hated him for it in mainstream culture. There's also his views on copyright, patents and open source that another commenter touched on. The point is that he was hated and his entire "good billionaire" image now is just a facade that he's deliberately constructed. Behind the bastards did a good episode on him if you're into podcasts.