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While there are many close friendships among tech CEOs, there are plenty of feuds too.
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Some appear to be friendly rivalries like Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison but, others have become more contentious.
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Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, for example, have been openly feuding for years, while Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have made digs at each other over outer space.
Silicon Valley is a breeding ground for rivalries. In a place where world-changing ideas are born and billions of dollars are at stake, it's only natural that rivalries develop between Silicon Valley's power players, ranging from friendly sparring to pointed critiques.
While some feuds, like the one between Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, appear to be born out of a close friendship and mutual respect, others - like the one between Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Spiegel - started over a spurned acquisition offer. Here are some of the long-standing feuds, friendly or otherwise, between some of the world's most powerful execs.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk aren't competitors in any earthly pursuits, but they're bitter rivals when it comes to outer space.
Bezos founded his rocket company, Blue Origin, in 2000, while Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. Two years later, the pair met for dinner, and even then, things were getting testy.
"I actually did my best to give good advice, which he largely ignored," Musk said after the meeting.
In 2013, their rivalry heated up when (along with SpaceX rival United Launch Alliance) filed a formal protest with the government. Musk called it a phony blocking tactic" and SpaceX eventually won the right to take over the pad. Months later, the two companies got into a patent battle, and soon after, Bezos and Musk took their feud public, trading barbs on Twitter.
Once, when the BBC asked Musk about Bezos, he responded, "Jeff who?" For his part, Bezos has frequently criticized the idea of colonizing Mars — a main goal of SpaceX — describing the idea as “un-motivating."
As recently as May 2019, Musk jabbed at Bezos again, calling him a copycat for Amazon's plan to launch internet-beaming satellites.
Marc Benioff and Larry Ellison
Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff met when Benioff began working Oracle when he was just 23 years old. He was a star early on, earning a “rookie of the year” award that same year and becoming Oracle’s youngest VP by the age of 26. He spent 13 years at Oracle, during which he became a trusted lieutenant to Ellison.
Benioff began working on Salesforce with Ellison's blessing, and Ellison became an investor, putting in $2 million early on. But since then, the duo has publicly feuded on multiple occasions. In 2000, Oracle launched software that directly competed with Salesforce. Benioff asked Ellison to resign from Salesforce's board, and Ellison refused (he eventually left the board, but Benioff let him keep his stock and options).
Over the years, Benioff and Ellison have sparred off and on: Ellison once mocked Salesforce, calling it an "itty bitty application" that's dependent on Oracle, while Benioff has called Oracle a "false cloud." And in 2011, Ellison ordered that Benioff be removed from the speaker lineup of Oracle's OpenWorld conference, which Benioff said was because Oracle was afraid he'd give a better speech. But throughout it all, Benioff has described Ellison as his mentor. "There is no one I've learned more from than Larry Ellison," Benioff said in 2013.
Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg
There is no love lost between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
While Apple is walking the success ladder higher, the two moguls have traded insults over the years, beginning as early as 2014, when Cook said in an interview that "when an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product."
Shortly after, Zuckerberg appeared noticeably tense in an interview with Time when the subject of Cook's comments came up with a befitting reply.
“What, you think because you're paying Apple that you're somehow in alignment with them? If you were in alignment with them, then they'd make their products a lot cheaper!”
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook
But the tension between Cook and Zuckerberg came to a head in the aftermath of , in which private Facebook user data was stolen from 50 million users. In 2018, Recode's Kara Swisher asked Cook what he would do if he was in Zuckerberg's shoes, to which he responded: "What would I do? I wouldn't be in this situation."
After this incident, a new startup FigLeaf developed .
Zuckerberg was reportedly so incensed by Cook's comments that he asked executives to switch to Android phones.
In a company blog post in 2018, Facebook confirmed the feud between the two execs: "Tim Cook has consistently criticized our business model and Mark has been equally clear he disagrees.”
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Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
In the early days of Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates got along — Microsoft made software for the Apple II computer, and Gates was a frequent guest in Cupertino, where Apple is headquartered.
But the tides started to turn in the early '80s when Jobs flew up to Microsoft's headquarters in Washington to try to convince Gates to make software for the Macintosh computer. Gates later described it as "a weird seduction visit" and said he felt like Jobs was saying "I don't need you, but I might let you be involved."
Still, they remained relatively friendly until 1985, when Microsoft launched the first version of Windows and Jobs accused him of ripping off the Macintosh.
"They just ripped us off completely, because Gates has no shame," Jobs later told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, to which Gates replied: "If he believes that, he really has entered into one of his own reality distortion fields."
The duo traded barbs for years, with Jobs calling Gates boring and Gates calling Jobs weirdly flawed as a human being." Tensions remained high even after Microsoft invested in Apple to keep it afloat, with both Gates and Jobs insulting each other and their companies' products time and time again.
Still, they respected and admired each other, despite their animosity. When Jobs died in 2011, Gates called him respectable.
"I respect Steve, we got to work together. We spurred each other on, even as competitors. None of [what he said] bothers me at all.”
Bill Gates, Co-Founder, Microsoft Corp.
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Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel and Mark Zuckerberg seemed to get off on the wrong foot right from the start, beginning with what may have been a Spiegel brush-off in 2012.
Snap had reportedly turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook on three separate occasions.
Spiegel and Zuckerberg haven't been friendly since. over the years — both on its own app and its subsidiary, Instagram — and the CEOs have made jabs at each other in public. In 2018, after Facebook cloned yet another Snapchat feature, Stories, Spiegel said: "We would appreciate it if they copied our data protection practices also," a dig at Facebook's various privacy scandals.