Bill Gates displays a paranoid tendency common among technology industry billionaires. “In this business, by the time you realise you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself,” he once said. “Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.”

Those words came in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1994 – 10 years before Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two new rock stars of the tech world, sat down for their own heart-to-heart with the same magazine.