Who’s Smarter: Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg?

Slashdot It! A variety of legends have grown up around Bill Gates’ brief career at Harvard. (He dropped out halfway through and co-founded Microsoft). On Tuesday night, during an interview at the “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Mr. Gates regaled the audience with his strategy of not bothering to attend classes and then catching up in a single intense burst during a separate reading period at the end of the term. On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, himself a Harvard dropout, appeared to one-up Mr. Gates. Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that he had also skipped classes, in particular avoiding “Art in the Time of Augustus.” When it came time for the end-of-term study period, he was too busy building the prototype of Facebook to bother to do the reading. So in an inspired last-minute save, he built a Web site with all of the important paintings and room for annotation. He then sent an e-mail message to the students taking the class offering it up as a community resource. In a half an hour, the perfect study guide had self-assembled on the Web. Mr. Zuckerberg noted that he passed the course, but he couldn’t remember the grade he received. Get Daily Updates via Email Protect your computer with Windows Onecare