Everyone needs an ego ideal. A kind of persona we want others to see us as. Warren Buffet, at one point the richest man in the world, styled himself as this folksy financial genius. It was a persona that he managed to pull on and wear quite well. It was a coat that he could fit into. And it had a marginally socially redemptive aspect. Like Gates, who imagined himself the nerdy magnate, who would save the world for various global diseases.