The young Gabe Newell thought he'd be a doctor until he ended up visiting his brother at Microsoft, where 'Steve Ballmer got mad and said 'If you're going to be hanging out here, why don't you do something useful?''

Gabe Newell in a Valve promotional video, on a yacht.

Valve co-founder and yacht-loving billionaire Gabe Newell has given a new interview to the YouTuber Zalkar Saliev (TikTok, IG). It's a wide-ranging chat that covers everything from Newell's earliest jobs to his current daily routine ("get up, work, go scuba diving"), and it turns out that the young Newell loved programming, but had no thoughts that it would ever lead to, y'know, a useful career.

"I started programming in high school," says Newell. "At the time programming wasn't really a career path. There were probably only a couple of thousand programmers in the United States, working on mainframe accounting software primarily, and maybe there were some people doing stuff at NASA, but it wasn't like people said 'Oh, you know, there's this huge industry where software gets developed.'