Bill Gates confirmed this in an interview published in PC Magazine in 1997 [1]: ..."Once we convinced IBM to go 16-bit (and we looked at 68000 which unfortunately wasn't debugged at the time so decided to go 8086)"...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20010823113747/https://www.pcmag...

Bill Gates claimed that at one of the Microsoft company meetings in the early 2000s.