Bill Gates' reputation is that he was an excellent coder in his day, and technically astute and incisive throughout his time leading Microsoft. In college (at Harvard), Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a full BASIC language interpreter in assembly language for a computer they didn't even have access to and which had only 4000 bytes of memory. They wrote it on a PDP-10 at Harvard that was running an Intel 8080 emulator. Bill Gates once said that he remembered every technical detail and variable name of those early programs, although surely that would not be true today.

Steve Jobs was never a programmer. He was a product visionary, astute businessman, and excellent if eccentric salesman. It was Steve Wozniak who built the Apple I while Steve promoted it. That said (from my experience working at his company NeXT), Steve had an amazing knack for understanding technical concepts and how they could be relevant. While he had never programmed, his technical people convinced him of the revolutionary power of object-oriented programming. As a result, he made object-oriented design the central theme of the NeXT machine and he developed a great sales pitch for its ability to reduce code bulk: "The line of code you don't write is the line of code you never have to debug."