Who is the best programmer: Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison or Linus Torvalds? Why? Today? Linus Torvalds, hands down. Jeff Bezos is not a programmer. Larry Ellison is not really a programmer, he did write some mainframe code when he was in his twenties. He and Bezos are though awesome kickass business people. Mark is quite a capable programmer, but probably not a superhero coder like Torvalds. Bill Gates was at the time probably among 10 best programmers when he was in his teens. He and Paul Allen wrote basic compiler for Altair with 4 KB of total memory. This is hard stuff. I don't know for sure, but I think they also wrote the Intel 8080 emulator on the mini computer they had access to at school, that on its own is pretty awesome. But he’s got other interests now and is totally awesome doing it. But as a programmer, only Linus Torvalds remains active, and he wrote the Linux kernel and Git source controller.