Buffett was visiting Meg Greenfield, a Washington Post editor based in Washington state at the time, he recalled at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in 2000. Greenfield was friends with Gates’ parents, so she took Buffett down to visit them. Gates initially had no interest in meeting Buffett as he had little respect for the investor’s livelihood.

“I didn’t even want to meet Warren because I thought, ‘Hey, this guy buys and sells things, and so he found imperfections in terms of markets – that’s not value added to society, that’s a zero-sum game that is almost parasitic.’ That was my view before I met him ... he wasn’t going to tell me about inventing something,” Gates said at a conference in 2019.

However, Gates changed his mind after Buffett began peppering him with “amazingly good questions that nobody had ever asked”, he recalled in a 2016 blog post.

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Buffett wasn’t thrilled to meet Gates either, but he quickly warmed to the Microsoft co-founder.

“We hit it off immediately,” the investor said in 2000. “We had a great time. He had this chimpanzee to whom he was going to try and explain this technical stuff. But I was kind of an interesting chimpanzee to him, and he’s a terrific teacher.”

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Given their special bond, both billionaires must be very happy that they didn’t skip that Fourth of July gathering 30 years ago.

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This article originally appeared on Business Insider