The Biggest Tech Bro Fights of the Year

• Tech titans have been beefing hard this year.
• In June, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk threatened to fight their rivalry out in the ring. 
• From physical fights to online snipes, here are the best fights of the year.

It’s been quite a year for Silicon Valley’s tech bros.

Whether it’s technological developments or chaotic corporate takeovers, all eyes have been on major tech companies and the men pulling the strings.

Some of these men, however, just can’t seem to play nice.

From Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg throwing punches to AI godfathers sniping at each other, tech titans haven’t kept their arguments behind closed doors this year.

Here’s a roundup of some of the best fights we’ve seen.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg

It was the fight that never was.

In June, social-media rivals Musk and Zuckerberg threatened to take their make their business beef personally and fight it out in the ring. Things seemed to be pretty serious for a while, with UFC president Dana White saying the pair were “dead serious” about the potential fight.

Sportsbooks even released a handful of hypothetical betting lines.

Yet, despite the media circus and an offer from Musk to drive to Zuckerberg’s house, the two never got further than online snipes.

The beef seems to have settled down so it’s unlikely we’ll see the pair in the ring — or the Colosseum — anytime soon.

AI godfathers

AI has been the issue on everyone’s mind this year.

While serious concerns about the potential risks of the technology have been raised by some of the most prominent experts in the field, not all of them can agree on exactly what we should be worried about.

The debate around the existential risks of AI came to a head between some of the tech’s founding members late this year.

Yann LeCun, Meta’s AI chief, took to social media to accuse AI founders, along with some of his former colleagues, of “fear-mongering.” LeCun then went on to call out his fellow Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio in another post.

In a response to Hinton, who has said AI poses an extinction risk, LeCun wrote on X: “You and Yoshua are inadvertently helping those who want to put AI research and development under lock and key and protect their business by banning open research, open-source code, and open-access models.”

In an interview with Business Insider, Bengio shot back at LeCun, saying the Meta chief was too dismissive of the risks. He said the stakes were just too high to ignore the extinction risks of AI.

Satya Nadella and Google

Early this year, it was fighting talk from Satya Nadella against old rival Google.

Buoyed by the success of OpenAI and the company’s quick integration into Microsoft’s search engine Bing, Nadella hoped to take on Google Search.

In a February interview with The Verge, the normally cool Nadella called Google the “800-pound gorilla” in search.

He said: “And I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance. And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think that’ll be a great day.”

Google was certainly rattled by Microsoft’s investment in the buzzy AI lab. The launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 reportedly triggered the tech giant to declare a code red and pump resources into AI development.

The two tech giants are still putting out AI products at pace but Microsft’s AI-powered Bing has struggled to lure users away from Google Search at a significant rate.

Sam Altman and Elon Musk

This year, Sam Altman became the face of AI after OpenAI’s ChatGPT kicked off an AI arms race between tech companies.

Never to be left out of the fray, fellow OpenAI cofounder Musk launched a few public jibes at the company and its flagship product.

Altman remained relatively cool in the face of the billionaire’s criticism. In March, Altman called Musk a “hero,” but acknowledged the Tesla CEO was “obviously attacking” his company online.

Altman said he understood some of Musk’s concerns about AI safety but wished that Musk would do more to acknowledge the work that OpenAI is doing to resolve these fears.