In a new book, Steve Jobs fires darts at old rival Bill Gates

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has a biography coming out next week in the wake of his death, and according to early reports of its content, the Apple co-founder didn’t have an entirely high opinion of his Microsoft rival, Bill Gates.

According to a copy of the book obtained by The Huffington Post, Jobs says that the Microsoft co-founder was more a copier than an innovator and pondered how Gates might have been different had gone on a spiritual hermitage or tripped on LSD when he was younger.

“He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger,” Jobs says about Gates in the book "Steve Jobs" by biographer Walter Isaacson.

“Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”

Jobs, the originator of the iPad, iPod and iPhone died Oct. 5 after a battle with cancer

Publisher Simon & Schuster has moved up the release date of its upcoming "Steve Jobs" biography from Nov. 21 to Oct. 24, due to skyrocketing demand for the book. The book is No.1 on Amazon's best-seller list, based on pre-orders.

Gates might be getting used to getting slammed in books written by or about tech titans.

Gates also came under fire earlier this year in a book by his Microsoft-co founding partner. Paul Allen’s “Idea Man” describes how Allen met Gates as an eighth-grader and how the two grew up to launch Microsoft. But the book’s most explosive parts come later, when Allen, diagnosed with cancer, writes that Gates tried to come up with a plan to dilute Allen’s equity in Microsoft.