Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates might be the world’s richest man, and both he and Facebook Inc. co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have pledged to give away more than half their fortunes, but according to an IBM Watson-powered analysis of their communication, they aren’t Silicon Valley’s most altruistic leaders.
In fact, the most altruistic of the 11 tech leaders analyzed by salary and career research website Paysa using Watson’s Personality Insights program were Amazon.com Inc. founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise president and CEO Meg Whitman, all of whom received an altruism score of 0.98 each.
Gates and Zuckerberg received altruism scores of 0.92 and 0.89, respectively, while fellow Giving Pledge signee and Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk received an altruism score of 0.95.
In another finding that could be seen as counterintuitive Musk, whose side projects include efforts to wire computers to peoples’ brains, was found to be the most cautious tech leader in Silicon Valley, with a score of 0.96, closely followed by Cisco Systems Inc. CEO Chuck Robbins, who scored 0.95.
The other leaders studied were Google Inc. cofounder Larry Page, Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, IBM Corp. president and CEO Ginni Rometty, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
To conduct the project, Paysa staff gathered speeches, essays, books, interview transcripts, and other forms of communication from each of the leaders, feeding 2500 words from each into the Watson Personality Insights API.
The result: A series of profiles that can be checked out below one at a time, and that Paysa compared based on key traits in the infographic that follows (click for a full version).
