The Walmart heirs' combined estimated net worth is nearly $380 billion.
All three of Sam Walton's surviving children have now made it into the $100 billion club.
In public, the Waltons live relatively modest lifestyles despite their wealth.
All three of Walmart founder Sam Walton's surviving children have made it into the $100 billion club as the retail giant's share price continues to soar.
The combined wealth of the Walmart heirs — which include founder Sam Walton's children, Rob, Jim, and Alice, as well as his grandson Lukas — is nearly $380 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Together, they're significantly ahead of the top individual names on the list, such as Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, or Mark Zuckerberg, though Elon Musk has recently seen his fortune outstrip their collective net worth.
While some have worked in the family business — whether that's serving on the company board or working to manage the family's wealth — others chose to pursue areas of personal passion.
Sam Walton, the original man behind the company that now encompasses both Walmart and Sam's Club, set his family up for financial success when he divided the ownership before he died.
Most recently, the Walton children have expanded voting control to their own, giving eight of Sam's grandchildren a say in the family holdings.
Sam wasn't a man of flashy luxury, but you can see how his children are living a slightly more lavish life now. Here's a look at how the Walton family empire spends its money:
Sam Walton opened the first Walmart store in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962.
The original Wal-Mart name tag used to look like this one, worn here by Sam Walton.
He married Helen Robson on Valentine's Day in 1942.
Sam and Helen had a Valentine's Day wedding.
April L. Brown/Associated Press
Together, they had four children: Rob, John, Jim, and Alice.
By the time Sam died in 1992, he had set up the company ownership in a way that minimized the estate taxes anyone on the receiving end would have to pay.
He set up his ownership of Walmart's stock in a family partnership — each of his children held 20% of Walton Enterprises, while he and Helen each held 10%. Helen inherited Sam's 10% tax-free when he died.
The stocks were carefully divided among the family.
John served in Vietnam as a Green Beret. When he returned from the war he held a series of jobs — like the Walmart company pilot, a crop duster, and the owner a few yachting companies — before becoming a Walmart board member.
John (second from left) pictured with members of his family.
In 2013, Christy decided to sell their Jackson Hole mansion. She also sold the family's ranch for an undisclosed price in 2016 after listing it for $100 million in 2011.
The family had a mansion in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
James "Jim" Walton is the youngest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton. He is 76 years old.
Jim Walton is now 76.
Walmart
He is chairman of the board of the family's Arvest Bank Group. One of the state's largest banks today, Arvest Bank has assets totaling more than $26 billion.
One of many Arvest Bank locations in Bentonville, Arkansas.
He also served on the Walmart board, starting in 2005 to fill the vacancy after his brother John died. Jim Walton's son, Steuart, took over his father's seat on the board in 2016.
Jim served on the board for more than a decade.
Rick T. Wilking/Stringer/Getty Images
Now, he presides over Walton Enterprises — the private company that deals with the investments and finances of the Walton family only — from modest offices in Bentonville, Arkansas.
The youngest of founder Sam Walton's children, Alice Walton is worth $112 billion, according to Bloomberg. She has been divorced twice and has no children. She is 75 years old.
Alice Walton is the youngest of Walmart founder Sam Walton's children.
AP/April L. Brown
Alice has never taken an active role in running the family business.
Alice Walton with Jim Walton in 2013.
REUTERS/Rick Wilking
Instead, she became a patron of the arts, which she fell in love with at a young age.
Alice has spent millions building her art collection.
D Dipasupil/Getty Images
When she was 10, she bought her first work of art: a reproduction of Picasso's "Blue Nude" for about $2, she told The New Yorker.
She has an immense private art collection, with original works from Andy Warhol and Georgia O'Keeffe. Alice opened a museum in Bentonville called Crystal Bridges in 2011 to house her $500 million private art collection.
The museum displays both paintings and sculptures, like this one by Alexander Calder (center).
Danny Johnston/Associated Press
The collection includes a Georgia O'Keeffe painting that Alice spent $44.4 million on in 2014 — the biggest sale for a woman's piece of art in history.
Her Millsap, Texas, property, Rocking W Ranch, sold to the Three Amigos Investment Group of Kermit, Texas, in September 2017 for an undisclosed amount.
It had an initial asking price of $19.75 million, which was reduced to $16.5 million. The working ranch had over 250 acres of pasture and outbuildings for cattle and horses.
In January 2016, Alice donated 3.7 million of her Walmart shares — worth about $225 million at the time — to the family's nonprofit, the Walton Family Foundation.
The Walton Family Foundation website.
Facebook/Walton Family Foundation
Sam and Helen started the foundation as a way to teach their children how to give back and how to work together.
The Walton Family Foundation was established in 1987, when Walmart celebrated its 25th anniversary.
Walton Family Foundation/YouTube
The charity awards millions of dollars in grants to causes that align with the foundation's values.
The foundation awarded $566.5 million in grants in 2022, according to its website.
Walton Family Foundation/YouTube
The foundation has three main areas of focus:
A project put on by the Walton Family Foundation.
Walton Family Foundation/YouTube
The foundation's focus on education was led by John. His brother Jim said John was really interested in being able to give parents choices when it came to their child's schooling.
The foundation was dedicated to supporting children's education.
Rob spearheaded the foundation's venture into environmental protection. One of the first grants they gave helped develop a sustainable fisheries label.
Rob launched the environmental and sustainability branch of the foundation.
A commitment to the family's home of Arkansas is another large part of the foundation. The website says this area of focus is about "advancing our home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta."
Walmart Inc., which owns Walmart and Sam's Club, is the largest retailer in the US in terms of revenue.
In fiscal year 2023, Walmart reported $648.1 billion in revenue.
Business Insider/Jessica Tyler
Even though the Walton family is raking in billions as a result of the company's success, they remain relatively under-the-radar in terms of flashing their wealth — much like their patriarch, Sam, did in the early years.
The Walton siblings.
AP/April L. Brown
In December, Walmart disclosed that Sam's children had granted voting rights to eight of their own children, bringing the total number of voices in the family fortune from three to eight, and keeping with Sam's vision for his legacy.
As US lawmakers worry the video-sharing platform, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, poses a danger to national security, TikTok is scrambling to fight a law requiring it be sold to a US owner by January 19 or else risk being banned in the country.
So who's leading the company through this turbulent period?
That would be Shou Zi Chew, TikTok's 41-year-old CEO from Singapore, who got his start as an intern at Facebook.
Here's a rundown on TikTok's head honcho:
Chew worked for Facebook when it was still a startup.
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg in 2010, before he took his company public.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
He earned his bachelor's degree in economics at the University College London before heading to Harvard Business School for his MBA in 2010.
While a student there, Chew worked for a startup that "was called Facebook," he said in a post on Harvard's Alumni website. Facebook went public in mid-2012.
Chew met his now-wife, Vivian Kao, via email when they were both students at Harvard.
Shou Zi Chew and Vivian Kao attend The 2022 Met Gala.
Theo Wargo/WireImage
They are "a couple who often finish each other's sentences," according to the school's alumni page, and have three kids.
Chew was CFO of Xiaomi before joining Bytedance.
Shou Zi Chew and Xiaomi's CEO give thumbs up at the listing of Xiaomi at the Hong Kong Exchanges on July 9, 2018
REUTERS/Bobby Yip
He became chief financial officer of the Chinese smartphone giant, which competes with Apple, in 2015. Chew helped secure crucial financing and led the company through its 2018 public listing, which would become one of the nation's largest tech IPOs in history.
He became Xiaomi's international business president in 2019, too.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in Washington, DC on Tuesday, February 14, 2023.
Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images.
Before joining Xiaomi, Chew also worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for two years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
He also worked at investment firm DST, founded by billionaire tech investor Yuri Milner, for five years. It was during his time there in 2013 that he led a team that became early investors in ByteDance, as the Business Chief and The Independent reported.
For a while, Chew was both the CEO of TikTok and the CFO of its parent company, ByteDance.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming
Zheng Shuai/VCG via Getty Images
Chew joined ByteDance's C-suite in March 2021, the first person to fill the role of chief financial officer at the media giant.
He was named CEO of TikTok that May at the same time as Vanessa Pappas was named COO. Bytedance founder and former CEO Zhang Yiming said at the time that Chew "brings deep knowledge of the company and industry, having led a team that was among our earliest investors, and having worked in the technology sector for a decade."
That November, it was announced that Chew would leave his role as ByteDance's CFO to focus on running TikTok.
TikTok's former CEO, Kevin Mayer, had left Walt Disney for the position in May 2020 and quit after three months as the company faced pressure from lawmakers over security concerns.
Some government officials in the US and other countries remain concerned that TikTok's user data could be shared with the Chinese government.
The Biden administration has demanded that TikTok divest its American business from ByteDance or risk being banned.
Jacquelyn Martin, Pool
Donald Trump's administration issued executive orders designed to force ByteDance into divesting its TikTok US operations, though nothing ever happened.
Wall Street said his testimony didn't do much to help his case to keep TikTok alive in the US, though Chew seemed to win over many TikTok users, with some applauding his efforts and even making flattering fancam edits of him.
Now, Chew and TikTok are in the spotlight again as the company tries to stave off a looming potential ban.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Thursday, March 23, 2023.
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The House of Representatives passed a bill on March 13 that would require any company owned by a "foreign adversary" to divest or sell to a US-based company within 180 days to avoid being banned in the US.
He called the vote "disappointing" and said the company has invested in improving data security and keeping the platform "free from outside manipulation."
"This bill gives more power to a handful of other social media companies," he added. "It will also take billions of dollars out of the pockets of creators and small businesses. It will put more than 300,000 American jobs at risk."
The Senate also passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law in April.
In September, a hearing on the potential TikTok ban began in federal appeals court and in December, a three-judge panel from the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the law is constitutional.
On the heels of the bad news, Chew met with the president-elect at Mar-a-Lago several days later.
Chew and Trump recently met.
Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Trump said in a press conference on the day they met that he has a "warm spot" for TikTok, which he has criticized in the past, because he says it helped him win over young voters in the 2024 election.
Also on the day of their meeting, TikTok asked the Supreme Court to block the law that requires it be sold to avoid a shutdown, arguing that it violates Americans' First Amendment rights.
When he's not fighting efforts to ban TikTok, Chew makes appearances at some pretty high-profile events.
Shou Zi Chew leaves Congress on March 23.
Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Palantir CEO Alex Karp took the company public in 2020 after launching the data firm in 2003.
Fabrice Coffrini/AFP
Alex Karp pursued a Ph.D. and invested on behalf of wealthy European clients before founding Palantir.
The secretive and controversial big-data company went public in 2020 and recently posted strong quarterly earnings.
Karp is an outspoken CEO who hasn't held back in defending the company against critics.
Alex Karp, longtime CEO of data mining company Palantir, has been taking a victory lap on the heels of the company's latest blowout earnings and rising stock price.
Palantir, which creates software to manage, analyze, and secure data, saw its stock hit an all-time high earlier this month.
Karp, who has been CEO since 2004, is known as an unusual leader, even by Silicon Valley standards. He pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy before joining the startup and sometimes works from a barn.
He and the company have courted controversy over the years, and he's known to be outspoken in defending the company's work with government agencies and the military, saying at a recent talk that he's proud "the death and pain that is brought to our enemies is mostly, not exclusively, brought by Palantir."
Here's how the 57-year-old Karp got his start, took the helm of the secretive startup, and built it into a multi-billion-dollar company.
Alex Karp grew up in Philadelphia.
Karp has described his parents as hippies.
Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
His parents were a pediatrician and an artist who Karp has described as hippies, saying they often took him to labor rights demonstrations and anti-Reagan protests when he was young. A 2018 Wall Street Journal profile called Karp a "self-described socialist."
Karp got his bachelor's degree at Haverford College in Pennsylvania before attending law school at Stanford University.
Karp met Peter Thiel, one of several people with whom he'd later co-found Palantir, at Stanford University, pictured here.
After law school, Karp began working on a Ph.D. in philosophy at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, studying under famed philosopher Jurgen Habermas.
Karp also pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy in Frankfurt, Germany, pictured here.
Pigprox/Shutterstock
Karp is fluent in German and speaks French as well.
Around the same time, an inheritance from his grandfather sparked an interest in investing.
Before heading up Palantir, he got into investing on behalf of wealthy clients.
Stefani Reynolds for AFP via Getty Images
According to Forbes, he quickly became successful at it and created a London-based firm called Caedmon Group, named after his middle name, investing on behalf of high-net-worth clients.
By 2003, Thiel, Karp's law school classmate, had already founded and sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion.
Palantir was founded by several Stanford and PayPal alums.
John Lamparski/Getty Images
He decided to launch Palantir, along with Stanford computer science graduates Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, plus Nathan Gettings, a PayPal engineer. By 2004, Karp joined as CEO.
Karp is known for being an eccentric leader.
Karp is known for some eccentric behavior.
Brendan McDermid/Reuters
He often wears brightly colored athletic wear, keeps Tai Chi swords in his offices, and was known to practice martial arts on his Palantir cofounders in the office hallways.
Karp is a fan of fitness and wellness who practices Qigong meditation and keeps vitamins and extra swim goggles stocked in his office.
He's a fan of Qigong meditation.
Yasuyoshi Chiba/Getty Images
He told Forbes that the only time he isn't thinking about Palantir is "when I'm swimming, practicing Qigong or during sexual activity."
Despite a net worth of around $7.1 billion by Forbes' estimates, Karp doesn't appear to spend lavishly.
Palantir was previously based in Palo Alto, California, but since moved its headquarters to Denver.
Palantir
Karp has been known to sometimes work out of a barn in New Hampshire. He has never been married and told Forbes that the idea of starting a family gives him "hives."
Palantir is also pretty secretive. Because of the company's contracts, many employees have government security clearances and receive five-figure bonuses for choosing to live close to the office, according to the Journal.
Palantir has courted numerous controversies over the years.
Palantir has drawn ire for licensing its tech to law enforcement.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The company has been criticized for licensing its technology to law enforcement, which has used it for practices like predictive policing and tracking cars' routes using just their license plates.
Palantir has also come under fire for its contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Palantir has also faced controversy for its ICE contracts.
Reuters/Shannon Stapleton
The company provides software that helps the agency gather, store, and search through data on undocumented immigrants. After employees pressed Karp on ending the company's contracts with ICE, he denied that its technology was being used to separate migrant families.
Karp has responded boastfully to criticism of the company's contracts with the military.
Karp has defended Palantir's use by military and intelligence agencies.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
"The death and pain that is brought to our enemies is mostly, not exclusively, brought by Palantir," he said at a talk in December 2024.
"You may not agree with that and, bless you, don't work here," Karp said in 2023 of tech workers who have qualms about the company's data mining.
The company went public in 2020.
Palantir began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020.
Noam Galai/Getty Images
It went public via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2020 at an estimated $20 billion valuation.
Following Palantir's Q3 2024 earnings report, Karp boasted about the company's performance and defended himself from critics.
Palantir's US revenue increased 44% year-over-year, it said in Q3 2024 earnings.
Bertrand Guay/Getty Images
"This is a US-driven AI revolution that has taken full hold," he said in an earnings release. "The world will be divided between AI haves and have-nots. At Palantir, we plan to power the winners."
During the subsequent earnings call, he said, "Given how strong our results are, I almost feel like we should just go home."
Responding to criticisms of his leadership, he said, "Instead of going into every meeting saying, 'Oh, yes, Palantir is great, but their fearless leader is batshit crazy, and he might go off to his commune in New Hampshire,' whatever thing we're saying, it's now like, yes, the products are best, and we have great products."
Palantir's stock has since hit an all-time high in December.
Now, Karp has a forthcoming book.
Karp's book comes out in February.
BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images
Slated for release on February 18, 2025, his book "The Technological Republic" argues that Silicon Valley has become complacent and lost its ambition.
He cowrote the book with Nicholas Zamiska, Palantir's head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to the office of the CEO.
You can make a Genmoji inspired by someone you've identified in your photo library or start fresh with instructions describing what you'd like your emoji to look like. If you don't like the initial result, you can keep refining it by tweaking the description. If you're happy with it, you can send it in a text or use it as a sticker or Tapback reaction.
Genmoji is available in iOS 18.2 on all iPhone 16 models, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max.
ChatGPT's integration in your iPhone
Apple's iOS 18.2 introduces ChatGPT integration.
Apple
Apple's iOS 18.2 software update launched the ChatGPT integration shown off earlier this spring.
Those with an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max, or iPhone 16 can now access ChatGPT through Siri and Writing Tools by saying or typing their inquiries, without having to go back and forth between apps. Users can tell ChatGPT to generate written content in Writing Tools or generate images to go alongside their written content.
OpenAI's Sora AI video generator launches
OpenAI's video generator, Sora, is now available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro users.
It can create videos up to 1080p resolution lasting up to 20 seconds from your written prompts or make up for missing frames by completing a scene or extending the length of an existing video.
OpenAI initially made a Sora preview available to some creators, designers, and filmmakers in February, but it's now available to ChatGPT Plus ($20 a month) and Pro users ($200 a month).
OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode with vision
ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode can see what you show it through your phone camera or share with it on your screen.
First demoed in the spring, ChatGPT can now see through your phone's camera or examine what's on your screen if you need to give the assistant visual context to help answer your questions.
The new video feature is rolling out this week in the latest version of the mobile app to ChatGPT Team and most ChatGPT Plus and Pro users.
Google Deep Research
Deep Research is available to Gemini Advanced users.
Google
Announced on Wednesday, Google Deep Research is Gemini Advanced's new agentic feature that can do deep dives on complex subjects for you.
Ask it a question, and it can browse the web "the way you do," Google said in a blog post. It'll ultimately generate a report you can export to Google Docs that contains key points and links to sources if you want to dig deeper.
Google Deep Research started rolling out this week in English on desktop and mobile web and will be available in the mobile app early next year.
They've recommended countless books over the years that they credit with strengthening their business acumen and shaping their worldviews.
Here are 20 books recommended by Musk, Bezos, and Gates to add to your reading list:
Jeff Bezos
Mario Tama/Getty Images
Some of Bezos' favorite books were instrumental to the creation of products and services like the Kindle and Amazon Web Services.
"The Innovator's Solution"
Harvard Business Review Press
This book on innovation explains how companies can become disruptors. It's one of three books Bezos made his top executives read one summer to map out Amazon's trajectory.
"The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement"
Amazon
Also on that list was "The Goal," in which Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox examine the theory of constraints from a management perspective.
The final book on Bezos' reading list for senior managers, "The Effective Executive" lays out habits of successful executives, like time management and effective decision-making.
"Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies"
HarperCollins Publishers/Amazon
This book draws on six years of research from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business that looks into what separates exceptional companies from their competitors. Bezos has said it's his "favorite business book."
This Kazuo Ishiguro novel tells of an English butler in wartime England who begins to question his lifelong loyalty to his employer while on a vacation.
Bezos has said of the book, "Before reading it, I didn't think a perfect novel was possible."
The Tesla CEO has recommended several AI books, sci-fi novels, and biographies over the years.
"What We Owe the Future"
Amazon
One of Musk's most recent picks, this book tackles longtermism, which its author defines as "the view that positively affecting the long-run future is a key moral priority of our time." Musk says the book is a "close match" for his philosophy.
"Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"
Amazon
Musk has also recommended several books on artificial intelligence, including this one, which considers questions about the future of intelligent life in a world where machines might become smarter than people.
"Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"
Amazon
In this book, MIT professor Max Tegmark writes about ensuring artificial intelligence and technological progress remain beneficial for human life in the future.
"Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future"
Amazon
Peter Thiel shares lessons he learned founding companies like PayPal and Palantir in this book.
Musk has said of the book, "Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how."
The Microsoft cofounder usually publishes two lists each year, one in the summer and one at year's end, of his book recommendations.
"How the World Really Works"
Penguin Random House
In his 2022 summer reading list, Gates highlighted this work by Vaclav Smil that explores the fundamental forces underlying today's world, including matters like energy production and globalization.
"If you want a brief but thorough education in numeric thinking about many of the fundamental forces that shape human life, this is the book to read," Gates said of the book.
"Why We're Polarized"
Simon & Schuster
Ezra Klein argues that the American political system has became polarized around identity to dangerous effect in this book, also on Gates' summer reading list in 2022, that Gates calls "a fascinating look at human psychology."
"Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street"
Amazon
Gates has said this is "the best business book I've ever read." It compiles 12 articles that originally appeared in The New Yorker about moments of success and failure at companies like General Electric and Xerox.
"Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think"
Amazon
This book investigates the thinking patterns and tendencies that distort people's perceptions of the world. Gates has called it "one of the most educational books I've ever read."
Peter Thiel, left, and Elon Musk, are two members of the so-called "PayPal Mafia."
Associated Press
A group of early 2000s PayPal employees and founders came to be known as the "PayPal Mafia."
The members have all gone on to impact Silicon Valley by founding and developing major companies.
The group includes Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and the founders of both YouTube and Yelp.
What do the founders of YouTube, Yelp, Tesla, and LinkedIn have in common?
Apart from creating some of the biggest companies in tech, they all share a common résumé line item: they've all worked at PayPal.
Many of PayPal's early employees went on to become major names in tech and the venture capital world, founding, funding, and otherwise developing successful companies. This elite group came to be known as the "PayPal Mafia," a nickname that gained popularity after Fortune used the term in a 2007 piece alongside a photo of some of the members dressed in gangster attire.
Members of the group include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and over a dozen others. Here's a rundown of the most prominent members of this exclusive group and what they're up to over two decades later.
Peter Thiel: PayPal's founder and the so-called "don" of the PayPal Mafia
Peter Thiel in 1999.
AP
Peter Thiel cofounded the company that would become Paypal — called Confinity — in 1999 alongside Max Levchin and Luke Nosek. Confinity was launched as a developer of security software for hand-held devices like the PalmPilot, but it later pivoted toward digital money transfers.
Thiel served as CEO of PayPal until October 2002, when eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion. Thiel's 3.7% stake was worth a $55 million, according to SEC filings.
Thiel went on to cofound Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has helped launch companies like SpaceX and Airbnb.
Thiel is now a billionaire.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Thiel, now a billionaire with a net worth of $15.9 billion, according to Bloomberg, cofounded the big data analysis firm Palantir in 2003. He was the first major outside investor in Facebook and contributed early funding to Yelp and LinkedIn, along with a number of other ventures launched by his PayPal peers. Thiel's also a partner of Founders Fund, a venture capital fund based in San Francisco.
Thiel has also drawn criticism in recent years for his support of President Donald Trump and for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media, which resulted in the company shutting down Gawker and selling the company's assets.
After facilitating talks between Trump and now Sen. JD Vance, Thiel gave a record-breaking $15 million to Vance's campaign, the largest donation ever given to a single senate candidate.
Thiel later told The Atlantic he was taking a break from politics. Business Insider later reported that he served as an FBI informant.
After PayPal was bought by eBay, Levchin founded a media-sharing service called Slide that was later bought by Google. He was also an early investor in Yelp — at one point he was the company's largest shareholder — and he served as chairman of Yelp from its founding in 2004 until July 2015.
He founded fintech company Affirm, which allows consumers to finance online purchases at the point of sale and pay for them over time. Affirm went public in 2021, raising $1.2 billion in its IPO. Levchin is also the chairman of Glow, a fertility-tracking app that helps users improve their odds of conceiving.
Ken Howery: PayPal cofounder and CFO from 1998 to 2002.
Howery served as PayPal's CFO.
Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
After eBay bought PayPal, Howery stayed on as eBay's director of corporate development until 2003. After PayPal's acquisition, he served as cofounder and partner of Founders Fund alongside Peter Thiel.
Howery recently served as US ambassador to Sweden.
Princess Madeleine of Sweden and Ambassador Ken Howery.
Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for the World Childhood Foundation
He was appointed by former President Trump in January 2019 and confirmed in September of that year. He also donated $1 million earlier this year to America PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC created by fellow PayPal mafia member Elon Musk.
Howery is active in several nonprofits and serves as a founding advisor to Kiva, an organization that facilitates loans to low-income entrepreneurs. Kiva was founded in part by Premal Shah, PayPal's former product manager.
Elon Musk: founder of (the other) X.com, which merged with Thiel's Confinity to become PayPal
Elon Musk pictured in the early days of PayPal.
AP
In 1999, Elon Musk founded a payments company called X.com, which merged with Thiel's Confinity in 2000. He briefly served as CEO of PayPal before he was ousted by the board in September 2000 and replaced with Thiel. But as the company's largest shareholder, he still walked away from the PayPal sale to eBay with a cool $165 million.
Musk is currently the world's richest person.
Musk now juggles multiple companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly Twitter.
Patrick Fallon / Reuters
Perhaps the best-known of all the members of the PayPal mafia now, Musk's estimated net worth is $362 billion.
Musk, who has been a vocal supporter of Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and donated more than $200 million to Republican election efforts, will also co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency alongside former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump announced after winning the election.
Luke Nosek: PayPal cofounder and vice president of marketing and strategy.
Nosek was also a PayPal cofounder.
Thomson Reuters
Nosek was also reportedly the person who clued in Peter Thiel to cryogenic preservation, which Thiel has since invested in heavily.
Nosek explored angel investing.
Nosek is a SpaceX investor.
David M. Benett/Getty Images for Netflix
In 2005, Nosek joined Thiel and Howery as a partner at Founders Fund. In 2017, Nosek left Founders Fund to launch investment firm Gigafund, which helped raise money for SpaceX.
Nosek was also the first institutional investor in SpaceX and is a board member. He also joined the board of ResearchGate, a platform where scientists and researchers can ask questions, follow topics, and review one another's papers.
Roelof Botha: PayPal's director of corporate development, vice-president of finance, CFO
Botha started at PayPal as director of corporate development.
Paul Zimmerman/Getty Images for TechCrunch/AOL
Botha went to school to be an actuary. He said he never planned to get into tech, but when he saw the opportunity in Silicon Valley, his intuition told him it was where he needed to be.
He started as PayPal's director of corporate development, went on to become vice-president of finance, and later served as CFO.
Botha is now a partner at venture capital firm Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital has funded tech giants like Apple, Google, YouTube, and Instagram.
Botha as served on the board at more than a dozen companies, including Square, EventBrite, Weebly, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, as well as 23andMe, which he resigned alongside the rest of the board in September over CEO Anne Wojcicki's proposal to take the company private.
Reid Hoffman: board of directors at PayPal, COO
Hoffman started on PayPal's board of directors.
Tony Avelar/AP
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman served on the board of directors when PayPal was founded.
He eventually joined the company full-time as PayPal's COO. In a New York Times interview, Peter Thiel referred to Hoffman as PayPal's "firefighter in chief," noting that there were many fires that needed putting out in the company's early days.
When PayPal was acquired by eBay, Hoffman was the company's executive vice president.
Hoffman cofounded LinkedIn and is one of Silicon Valley's most prolific angel investors.
Hoffman has coauthored several books on startups and professional development. He hosts the "Masters of Scale" podcast, on which he interviews founders about how they launched and scaled their companies, and is a partner at VC firm Greylock Partners. He was an early investor in OpenAI and used to serve on its board, and cofounded Inflection AI.
Hoffman has also recently criticized business leaders, including his fellow PayPal mafia members, for supporting Trump.
David Sacks: PayPal COO
Sacks served as PayPal's COO.
Owen Thomas, Business Insider
Like Hoffman, Sacks also served as COO at PayPal. Previously a management consultant for McKinsey & Company, David Sacks joined PayPal in 1999.
After PayPal was bought by eBay, Sacks produced and financed the box office hit "Thank You For Smoking," which would go on to be nominated for two Golden Globes. In 2006 he founded Geni.com, an online tool for building family trees.
Sacks founded several companies, became an angel investor, and was named Trump's AI and crypto 'czar'
Sacks is a serial entrepreneur and investor, with angel investments in Airbnb, Postmates, Slack, and many more.
He's also a member of Elon Musk's inner circle and, like the Tesla CEO, is an avid Trump supporter, hosting a fundraiser for the president-elect at his home. Sacks reportedly urged Trump personally to choose Vance as his running mate, whom he was introduced to by fellow Paypal mafia member Thiel.
Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen met at PayPal during its early days.
Steven Chen, left, and Chad Hurley.
Noah Berger/AP
Karim and Chen were engineers, while Hurley was a web designer.
In 2005, the trio launched the video-sharing platform YouTube. Karim uploaded the platform's very first video, "Me at the zoo," an 18-second clip of Karim in front of the San Diego Zoo's elephant exhibit. It's been viewed over 292 million times.
Today, Karim, Hurley, and Chen remain active entrepreneurs and investors with a hand in projects from finance to music.
The trio went on to become investors.
David Buchan/Getty Images
Karim launched venture fund YVentures in 2008, through which he invested in Palantir, Reddit, Eventbrite, and Airbnb.
Hurley stepped down as CEO of YouTube in 2010. Since then, he's backed education startup Uptime and invested in several sports teams.
Chen invested in actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt's musical collaboration platform HitRecord, which in February secured $6.4 million in Series A funding.
Andrew McCormack: assistant to Peter Thiel at PayPal
In 2003, McCormack started a restaurant group in San Francisco. In 2008, he joined Thiel Capital and worked there for 5 years.
McCormack went on to launch VC firm Valar Ventures
Peter Thiel.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
McCormack partnered up with Thiel again in 2010 to found Valar Ventures, a venture capital fund.
Valar Ventures has invested in technology startups well beyond Silicon Valley, including some in Europe and Canada. In August, Crunchbase reported the firm had closed on a $150 million funding round for a new venture capital fund, Valar Fund V.
McCormack continues to serve as a managing partner of the firm.
Keith Rabois: PayPal's executive vice president
Rabois served as PayPal's executive vice president.
Fortune Live Media via Flickr
Entrepreneur Keith Rabois served as PayPal's executive vice president from 2000 to 2002.
He would go on to join his PayPal colleague Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn as its vice president for business and corporate development from 2005 to 2007. He was an early investor in startups like Square, where he spent two-and-a-half years as COO.
Rabois joined Thiel, Howery, and Nosek as a partner at Founders Fund.
Rabois has invested in a number of major companies.
He was a general partner at Founder's Fund, where he cofounded OpenStore, before returning to Khosla Ventures in early 2024.
Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman: worked on technology at PayPal.
Eric Risberg/AP
Simmons was an engineer and Stoppelman was the vice president of technology after joining PayPal from X.com.
In 2004, the pair came up with the idea for a platform where users could leave recommendations about businesses in their area. They pitched the idea to Levchin, who provided an early investment of $1 million, and Yelp was born.
Simmons left his official role at Yelp in 2010, while Stoppelman continues to serve as Yelp's CEO.
In 2017, Selby was revealed to be the generous tipper behind "Tips for Jesus."
Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
Selby later helped manage Thiel Capital, the Thiel's family office, and started his own venture capital fund, AZ-VC, where he serves as managing partner. He still serves as managing director at Thiel Capital.
Starting in 2013, Selby began anonymously leaving tips for unsuspecting waitstaff, ranging into the thousands, and signing them "Tips for Jesus." His identity was confirmed by a New York City bartender who served him prior to receiving a $5,000 tip.
Dave McClure: PayPal's director of marketing
McClure served PayPal's director of marketing.
Edward Wong/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
McClure served PayPal's director of marketing as for four years beginning in 2001.
According to McClure's LinkedIn, he began a program called the PayPal Developer Network, which consisted of about 300,000 developers that were using PayPal.
He's since become an investor and owner in a professional sports league for ultimate frisbee and cofounded Practical Venture Capital, according to his LinkedIn.
Several more former PayPal employees went on to have careers both in and out of tech.
Joe Lonsdale, who got his start as a finance intern at PayPal.
Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Yishan Wong was an engineering manager who later served as CEO of Reddit from 2011 to 2014. He then founded the reforestation company Terraformation in 2020, where he now serves as CEO.
Jason Portnoy worked in finance at PayPal, and went on to work at Clarium Capital and Palantir. He's now a partner at VC firm Oakhouse Partners.
Premal Shah was a product manager at PayPal beginning in 2000, then went on to work at technology nonprofit Kiva. He's now president at financial-services startup Branch.
David Gausebeck was a technical architect at PayPal. Now, he serves as chief scientist at 3D modeling company Matterport. He cofounded 3D modeling company Matterport, where he now serves as chief scientist.
Joe Lonsdale started his career as a finance intern at PayPal before moving into venture capital — he's worked at VC firms Clarium Capital, Formation 8, and 8VC. Lonsdale also cofounded Palantir, and has reportedly contributed to a Trump PAC.
Eric Jackson was director of marketing at PayPal and went on to write a book about the company called "The PayPal Wars." He's currently the CEO of CapLinked.
Donald Trump (right) on Tuesday escalated his feud with Elon Musk in a Truth Social post belittling the billionaire.
Andrew Kelly, Gaelen Morse/Reuters
Elon Musk and Donald Trump have had a tumultuous relationship over the years.
While the two traded barbs during Trump's first presidency, they're now political allies.
Trump officially added Musk to join his administration to help lead his DOGE effort, and Musk calls himself "first buddy."
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are now spending lots of time together, marking a new era of their working relationship.
The world's richest person and president-elect have become close political allies, with Musk calling himself "first buddy" following Trump's most recent victory and donating more than $200 million toward pro-Trump super PACs.
Trump tasked Elon Musk with recommending cost cuts in the federal government, appointing the Tesla CEO to the new Department of Government Efficiency council.
It wasn't always this cozy between the two billionaires, however.
Here's how they reached this point.
November 2016: Musk says Trump is 'not the right guy' for the job
"I feel a bit stronger that he is not the right guy. He doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States," Musk said.
The billionaire added that Hillary Clinton's economic and environmental policies were the "right ones."
December 2016: Musk appointed to Trump's advisory councils
Donald Trump on Tuesday escalated his feud with Elon Musk in a series of Truth Social posts belittling the billionaire.
Evan Vucci/AP Photo
After he won the presidency, Trump appointed Musk to two economic advisory councils, along with other business leaders like Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
Musk got flack for working with the controversial president, but defended his choice by saying he was using the position to lobby for better environmental and immigration policies.
"You have to give him credit," the former president said, referring to Tesla becoming more valuable than Ford and General Motors. "He's also doing the rockets. He likes rockets. And he's doing good at rockets too, by the way."
Trump went on to call Musk "one of our great geniuses" and likened him to Thomas Edison.
May 2020: Trump backs up Musk in feud with California covid rules
Elon Musk meets Donald Trump at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. May 30, 2020.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
As the pandemic gripped the US in early 2020, Musk clashed with California public-health officials who forced Tesla to temporarily shut down its factory there. Trump voiced his support for Musk.
"California should let Tesla & @elonmusk open the plant, NOW," Trump tweeted in May 2020. "It can be done Fast & Safely!"
Musk called the ban a "morally bad decision" and "foolish to the extreme" in an interview with the Financial Times. Twitter kicked Trump off of its platform following the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
The Tesla billionaire has called himself a "free speech absolutist," and one of his key goals for taking Twitter private was to loosen content moderation.
July 2022: Trump calls Musk a 'bullshit artist'
Former US President Donald Trump speaks during a "Save America" in Anchorage, Alaska on July 9, 2022
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
In July, Trump took aim at Musk, claiming the businessman voted for him but later denied it.
"You know [Musk] said the other day 'Oh, I've never voted for a Republican,'" Trump said during a Saturday rally in Anchorage, Alaska. "I said 'I didn't know that.' He told me he voted for me. So he's another bullshit artist."
On Monday, Musk tweeted that Trump's claim was "not true."
"I don't hate the man, but it's time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset. Dems should also call off the attack – don't make it so that Trump's only way to survive is to regain the Presidency," he tweeted.
He continued: "Do we really want a bull in a china shop situation every single day!? Also, I think the legal maximum age for start of Presidential term should be 69." Trump is 76 years old.
July 2022: Trump lashes out
Former President Donald Trump gives the keynote address at the Faith and Freedom Coalition during their annual conference on June 17, 2022, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Seth Herald/Getty Images
Trump then went on the offensive, posting a lengthy attack on Musk on Truth Social, the social media company he founded.
"When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, 'drop to your knees and beg,' and he would have done it," Trump said in a post that criticized two of Musk's ventures, Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX.
October 2022: Trump cheers Musk's Twitter deal, but says he won't return
Following Musk's official buyout of Twitter on Thursday, Trump posted to Truth Social cheering the deal.
"I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country," he said. He added that he likes Truth Social better than other platforms, echoing comments from earlier this year in which he ruled out a return to Twitter.
On Monday, Musk joked about the potential of welcoming the former president back to his newly acquired platform.
"If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if Trump is coming back on this platform, Twitter would be minting money!," the Tesla CEO tweeted.
May 2023: Musks hosts Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' glitchy debut
Musk and other right-leaning voices in Silicon Valley initially supported Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. DeSantis ended 2022 as Trump's best-positioned primary challenger. In November 2022, as DeSantis was skyrocketing to acclaim, Musk said he would endorse him. In March 2023, after enduring Trump's attacks for months, DeSantis prepared to make history by formally announcing his campaign in an interview on Twitter.
"We actually do need a wall and we need to require people to have some shred of evidence to claim asylum to enter, as everyone is doing that," Musk wrote on X. "It's a hack that you can literally Google to know exactly what to say! Will find out more when I visit Eagle Pass maybe as soon as tomorrow."
Like Trump and others on the right, Musk had criticized the broader consensus in Washington for focusing too much on Russia's unprovoked war against Ukraine in comparison to domestic issues like migration.
March 2024: Trump tries to woo Musk, but the billionaire says he won't give him money.
Trump tried to woo Musk during a meeting at the former president's Mar-a-Lago resort. According to The New York Times, Trump met with Musk and a few other GOP megadonors when the former president's campaign was particularly cash-strapped. After The Times published its report, Musk said he would not be "donating money to either candidate for US President."
It wasn't clear who Musk meant in terms of the second candidate. He had repeatedly criticized President Joe Biden, who looked poised to be headed toward a rematch with Trump.
July 2024: Musk endorses Trump after the former president is shot
Musk said he "fully endorsed" Trump after the former president was shot during a political rally ahead of the Republican National Convention. The billionaire's endorsement marked a major turning point in his yearslong political evolution from an Obama voter. Days later, it would come to light that Musk pressed Trump to select Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate.
Trump announced Vance as his vice presidential pick at the Republican National Convention.
The ticket, Musk wrote on X, "resounds with victory."
It wasn't just his public support that Musk was offering. In July, the Wall Street Journal reported Musk had pledged roughly $45 million to support a pro-Trump super PAC. Musk later said he would donate far less, but his rebranding into a loyal member of the MAGA right was complete.
August 2024: Trump joins Musk for a highly anticipated interview
Trump, who ended the Republican National Convention primed for victory, stumbled after Biden abruptly dropped out of the 2024 race. The former president and his allies have struggled to attack Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic presidential nominee.
In August, Trump began floating the idea that he "certainly would" consider adding Musk to his Cabinet or an advisory role. The Tesla CEO responded by tweeting an AI-generated photo of himself on a podium emblazoned with the acronym "D.O.G.E"—Department of Government Efficiency.
"I am willing to serve," he wrote above the image.
September 2024: Musk says he's ready to serve if Trump gives him an advisory role
In September, Trump softened the suggestion of Musk joining his Cabinet due to his time constraints with running his various business ventures, the Washington Post reported. However, he also said that Musk could "consult with the country" and help give "some very good ideas."
"I can't wait. There is a lot of waste and needless regulation in government that needs to go," he wrote.
He later tweeted again to show his interest in being appointed by Trump, writing that he "looked forward to serving" the country and would be willing to do with without any pay, title, or recognition.
Trump is reportedly soon to announce that he has taken Musk's advice and is forming a government efficiency commission.
October 2024: Musk speaks at Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania
Elon Musk spoke at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Musk joined Trump onstage during the former president's rally, hosted on October 5 in the same location where Trump survived an assassination attempt in July. Musk sported an all-black "Make America Great Again" cap and briefly addressed the crowd, saying that voter turnout for Trump this year was essential or "this will be the last election."
"President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution," Musk said. "He must win to preserve democracy in America."
The next day, Musk's America PAC announced that it would be offering $47 to each person who refers registered voters residing in swing states to sign a petition "in support for the First and Second Amendments."
By October, the PAC had reportedly already spent over $80 million on the election, with over $8.2 million spread across 18 competitive House races for the GOP.
The Tesla CEO later told former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that he might face "vengeance" if Trump loses the election.
November 2024: Trump wins the presidency and names Musk his administration
Trump and Musk seen together at the UFC 309 event on November 16, 2024.
Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC
Musk was by Trump's side on election night at Mar-a-Lago, helping celebrate his victory.
Nearly a week after his 2024 presidential election win, Trump announced that Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy were chosen to lead a newly minted Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE, as Musk likes to call it, in reference to the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Dogecoin).
"Together, these two wonderful Americans will pay the way for my Administration to dismantle the Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies," Trump said in a statement.
It's unclear whether the department will formally exist within the government, though Trump said the office would "provide advice and guidance from outside of Government" and work directly with the White House and Office of Management & Budget.
Musk responded in a post on X that the Department of Government Efficiency will be post all their actions online "for maximum transparency."
"Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know!" Musk wrote. "We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining."
Outside of administrative duties, Musk has also joined "almost every meeting and many meals that Mr. Trump has had," The New York Times reported, acting as a partial advisor and confidant. The Tesla CEO also reportedly joined Trump's calls with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan while both men were at the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago club, where Musk seems to have settled in.
"Elon won't go home," Trump told NBC News jokingly. "I can't get rid of him."
The two's close relationship has extended to a more personal friendship. Musk was seen attending Trump's Thanksgiving dinner and on the golf course with Trump and his grandchildren, where Kai Trump said he achieved "uncle status."
Since 2016, the closed-captioning company The Captioning Group has compiled the list on behalf of the language platform Babbel, bringing together all the terms that newscasters, politicians, and public figures struggled to pronounce correctly on TV.
Esteban Touma, a linguistic and cultural expert at Babbel, told Business Insider this year's words were a snapshot of the political, cultural, and musical zeitgeist.
Ready to test your pronunciation chops?
In no particular order, here are the top 10 most mispronounced words of the year, according to Babbel's report.
Semaglutide
Semaglutide is the active ingredient in Ozempic.
Peter Hansen/Getty Images
There is more to the hype surrounding semaglutide, the active ingredient of the weight loss medication Ozempic, than just its effects.
For those unfamiliar with the antidiabetic medication, pronouncing it can be a challenge.
Pronunciation: sem-ah-GLOO-tide
Pete Buttigieg
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was one of the face's of the Democrats' efforts to win voters for Harris.
Liu Jie/Xinhua via Getty Images
The transportation secretary and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was one of the Democrats' most articulate spokespeople when he took over the airwaves and tried to appeal to swing voters and moderates for Harris.
He's also been known to spar with Elon Musk online.
Pronunciation: peet BOOD-ih-judge
Shein
Shein and other fast fashion companies have come under scrutiny for poor product quality and poor working conditions.
Rodrigo Arangua/AFP via Getty Images
The name of the fast fashion company Shein is frequently mispronounced as "Sheen." The company is reportedly planning to debut on the London Stock Exchange early next year.
Pronunciation: SHE-in
Kamala Harris
The first part of Kamala Harris' name is pronounced like "comma."
Tom Williams/Getty Images
Vice President Kamala Harris has often seen her name being mispronounced, most recently in the run-up to the November 2024 presidential election.
Her nieces, Amara and Leela, helped set the record straight onstage at the DNC in August.
"It's like a comma in a sentence," explained Amara. "Then you say 'la,' like 'la la la,'" added Leela.
Pronunciation: COM-a-la HAR-iss
Zendaya
Zendaya recently starred in "Challengers" and the second "Dune" film.
Taylor Hill/WireImage
Actress Zendaya starred as tennis prodigy Tashi Duncan in "Challengers" and as Chani in "Dune: Part II." Her name is frequently mispronounced "Zen-DIE-a."
Pronunciation: Zen-DAY-a
Chappell Roan
Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" was a hit this year.
Mary Mathis for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
She has humorously called out those who said [SHA-pel ROW-an] during a live performance, making it clear that it's actually [CHAP-uhl], which sounds like chapel, and [ROHN], which rhymes with tone.
Pronunciation: CHAP-uhl ROHN
SPECULOOS-3b
An artist's visualization of the Speculoos-3 b exoplanet.
NASA
SPECULOOS-3b is an Earth-sized exoplanet that orbits a red dwarf that captured global attention in May when astronomers announced its discovery at a distance of 55 light-years.
Pronunciation: SPEK-yuh-lohss three bee
Phryge
A performer wearing a "Phryge" Olympic mascot costume performs during a parade of French athletes who competed in the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games on the Champs-Elysees avenue in Paris on September 14, 2024.
Andre PAIN / POOL / AFP
The phryge, the mascot of the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics, was chosen as a symbol of freedom and to represent allegorical figures of the French Republic.
Pronunciation: FREE-je
Barry Keoghan
Barry Keoghan attends the 2024 Golden Globes.
Amy Sussman/Getty Images
The Irish actor rose to prominence for his role in Emerald Fennell's "Saltburn" last year, though Sabrina Carpenter fans will also know him as the pop singer's boyfriend.
Though the letter "G" is often silent in Irish names, Keoghan's last name has a distinct "G" sound.
Pronunciation: BARR-ee key-OH-gin
Dutch Kooikerhondje
The breed has brightly spotted fur and floppy ears.
Shutterstock
Shohei Ohtani's dog, a Dutch Kooikerhondje, "threw" the first pitch at a game at Dodger Stadium after the Dodgers' pitcher signed a historic 10-year, $700 million deal with the MLB team.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk aimed to create a nonprofit focused on developing AI.
Getty
Elon Musk helped found OpenAI, but he has frequently criticized it in recent years.
Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in August and just amended it to include Microsoft.
Here's a history of Musk and Altman's working relationship.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman lead rival AI firms and now take public jabs at each other — but it wasn't always like this.
Years ago, the two cofounded OpenAI, which Altman now leads. Musk departed OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, in 2018, and recently announced his own AI venture, xAI.
There is enough bad blood that Musk sued OpenAI and Altman, accusing them in the suit of betraying the firm's founding principles, before dropping the lawsuit. The billionaire then filed a new one a few months later, claiming he was "deceived" into confounding the company. In November, he amended it to include Microsoft as a defendant, and his lawyers accused the two companies of engaging in monopolistic behavior. Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI.
Two weeks later, Musk's lawyers filed a motion requesting a judge to bring an injunction against OpenAI that would block it from dropping its nonprofit status. In the filing, Musk accused OpenAI and Microsoft of exploiting his donations to create a for-profit monopoly.
Here's a look at Musk and Altman's complicated relationship over the years:
Musk and Altman cofounded OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, in 2015, alongside other Silicon Valley figures, including Peter Thiel, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Y Combinator cofounder Jessica Livingston.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk aimed to create a nonprofit focused on developing AI.
Getty
The group aimed to create a nonprofit focused on developing artificial intelligence "in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole," according to a statement on OpenAI's website from December 11, 2015.
At the time, Musk said that AI was the "biggest existential threat" to humanity.
Musk said AI was the "biggest existential threat" to humanity.
Carina Johansen/Getty Images
"It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly," a statement announcing the founding of OpenAI reads.
Musk stepped down from OpenAI's board of directors in 2018.
OpenAI said in a blog post that Musk stepping down would "eliminate" a potential conflict with Tesla.
With his departure, Musk also backed out of a commitment to provide additional funding to OpenAI, a person involved in the matter told The New Yorker.
"It was very tough," Altman told the magazine of the situation. "I had to reorient a lot of my life and time to make sure we had enough funding."
It was reported that Sam Altman and other OpenAI cofounders had rejected Musk's proposal to run the company in 2018.
Sam Altman and other OpenAI cofounders reportedly rejected Musk's proposal to run the company.
JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images
Semafor reported in 2023 that Musk wanted to run the company on his own in an attempt to beat Google. But when his offer to run the company was rejected, he pulled his funding and left OpenAI's board, the news outlet said.
In 2019, Musk shared some insight on his decision to leave, saying one of the reasons was that he "didn't agree" with where OpenAI was headed.
Musk said he "didn't agree" with where OpenAI was headed.
Susan Walsh/AP
"I had to focus on solving a painfully large number of engineering & manufacturing problems at Tesla (especially) & SpaceX," he tweeted. "Also, Tesla was competing for some of same people as OpenAI & I didn't agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do. Add that all up & it was just better to part ways on good terms."
Musk has taken shots at OpenAI on several occasions since leaving.
Musk said he didn't have high confidence in Dario Amodei for safety.
Frederic Brown/Getty Images
Two years after his departure, Musk said, "OpenAI should be more open" in response to an MIT Technology Review article reporting that there was a culture of secrecy there, despite OpenAI frequently proclaiming a commitment to transparency.
In December 2022, days after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Musk said the company had prior access to the database of Twitter — now owned by Musk — to train the AI chatbot and that he was putting that on hold.
Musk said OpenAI had had access to Twitter's database.
Getty Images
"Need to understand more about governance structure & revenue plans going forward. OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true," he said.
Musk was reportedly furious about ChatGPT's success, Semafor reported in 2023.
In February 2023, Musk doubled down, saying OpenAI as it exists today is "not what I intended at all."
Musk said OpenAI didn't turn out as he intended.
Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair
"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it "Open" AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all," he said in a tweet.
Musk repeated this assertion a month later.
"I'm still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated ~$100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn't everyone do it?" he tweeted.
Musk was one of more than 1,000 people who signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training advanced AI systems.
Musk signed an open letter calling for a six month pause on training advanced AI systems.
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
The March 2023 letter, which also received signatures from several AI experts, cited concerns about AI's potential risks to humanity.
"Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable," the letter says.
But while he was publicly calling for the pause, Musk was quietly building his own AI competitor, xAI, The New Yorker reported in 2023. He launched the company in March 2023.
Altman has addressed some of Musk's gripes about OpenAI.
Altman has responded to some of the claims Musk has made about OpenAI.
Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch
"To say a positive thing about Elon, I think he really does care about a good future with AGI," Altman said last year on an episode of the "On With Kara Swisher" podcast, referring to artificial general intelligence.
"I mean, he's a jerk, whatever else you want to say about him — he has a style that is not a style that I'd want to have for myself," Altman told Swisher. "But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future's going to look like for humanity."
In response to Musk's claim that OpenAI has turned into "a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," Altman said on the podcast, "Most of that is not true, and I think Elon knows that."
Altman has also referred to Musk as one of his heroes.
Altman has referred to Musk as one of his heroes.
Drew Angerer/Getty
In a March 2023 episode of Lex Fridman's podcast, Altman also said, "Elon is obviously attacking us some on Twitter right now on a few different vectors."
In a May 2023 talk at University College London, Altman was asked what he's learned from various mentors, Fortune reported. He answered by speaking about Musk.
"Certainly learning from Elon about what is just, like, possible to do and that you don't need to accept that, like, hard R&D and hard technology is not something you ignore, that's been super valuable," he said.
Musk has since briefly unfollowed Altman on Twitter before following him again; separately, Altman later poked fun at Musk's claim to be a "free speech absolutist."
Musk briefly unfollowed Altman on Twitter before following him again.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Twitter took aim at posts linking to rival Substack in 2023, forbidding users from retweeting or replying to tweets containing such links, before reversing course. In response to a tweet about the situation, Altman tweeted, "Free speech absolutism on STEROIDS."
Altman joked that he'd watch Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's rumored cage fight.
Altman joked about watching Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's cage fight.
Issei Kato/Reuters
"I would go watch if he and Zuck actually did that," he said at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in June 2023, though he said he doesn't think he would ever challenge Musk in a physical fight.
Altman also repeated several of his previous remarks about Musk's position on AI.
"He really cares about AI safety a lot," Altman said at Bloomberg's summit. "We have differences of opinion on some parts, but we both care about that and he wants to make sure we, the world, have the maximal chance at a good outcome."
Separately, Altman told The New Yorker in August 2023 that Musk has a my-way-or-the highway approach to issues more broadly.
"Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it," Altman said.
Musk first sued Altman and OpenAI in March 2024.
Musk has since dropped the original lawsuit against OpenAI.
Slaven Vlasic, Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty Images
He first sued OpenAI, Altman, and cofounder Greg Brockman in March, alleging the company's direction in recent years has violated its founding principles.
His lawyers alleged OpenAI "has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world" and is "refining an AGI to maximize profits for Microsoft, rather than for the benefit of humanity."
The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI executives played on Musk's concerns about the existential risks of AI and "assiduously manipulated" him into cofounding the company as a nonprofit. The intent of the company was to focus on building AI safely in an open approach to benefit humanity, the lawsuit says.
The company has since decided to take a for-profit approach.
OpenAI responded to the lawsuit by stating that "Elon's prior emails continue to speak for themselves."
The emails, which were published by OpenAI in March, show correspondence between Musk and OpenAI executives that indicated he supported a pivot to a for-profit model and was open to merging the AI startup with Tesla.
Musk expanded his beef with OpenAI to include Microsoft, accusing the two of constituting a monopoly
Musk added Microsoft as a defendant in the lawsuit against OpenAI.
The billionaire called OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft a "de facto merger" and accused the two of anti-competitive practices, such as engaging in "lavish compensation." Musk's lawyers said the two companies "possess a nearly 70% share of the generative AI market."
"OpenAI has attempted to starve competitors of AI talent by aggressively recruiting employees with offers of lavish compensation, and is on track to spend $1.5 billion on personnel for just 1,500 employees," lawyers for Musk said in the complaint.
Two weeks later, Musk filed a motion asking a judge to prevent OpenAI from dropping its nonprofit status.
Elon Musk sued OpenAI in March but dropped the lawsuit in June.
Anadolu
Musk filed a complaint to Judge Yvonne GonzalezRogers of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, arguing that OpenAI and Microsoft exploited his donations to OpenAI as a nonprofit to build a monopoly "specifically targeting xAI." In the filing, Musk's lawyers said OpenAI engaged in anticompetitive behaviors and wrongfully shared information with Microsoft.
If granted by the judge, the injunction could cause issues with OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft and prevent it from becoming a for-profit company.
As Musk's influence on US policy grows, his feud with Altman hangs in the balance.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk grew close during the presidential race.
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As President-elect Donald Trump's self-proclaimed "First Buddy," Musk's power and influence on the US economy could increase even further over the next four years. In addition to being a right-hand-man to Trump, he'll lead the new Department of Government Efficiency with biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.
Musk hasn't been quiet about his disdain for Altman post-election. He dubbed the OpenAI cofounder "Swindly Sam" in an X post on November 15. The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk "despises" Altman, according to people familiar.
Bill Gates has three children with Melinda French Gates, his ex-wife, and now has his first grandchild as well.
Mark J. Terrill/AP Images
Bill Gates, the Microsoft cofounder, shares three kids with his ex-wife Melinda French Gates.
They include a recent med school graduate and a fashion startup cofounder.
Here's what we know about the children of one of the world's richest men.
Bill Gates' story is a quintessential example of the American entrepreneurial dream: A brilliant math whiz, Gates was 19 when he dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen in 1975.
Nearly 50 years later, Gates' net worth of $131 billion makes him one of the richest and most famous men on Earth, per Forbes. He stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020 and has cultivated his brand of philanthropy with the Gates Foundation — a venture he formerly ran with his now ex-wife Melinda French Gates, who resigned in May.
Even before founding one of the world's most valuable companies, Gates' life was anything but ordinary. He grew up in a well-off and well-connected family, surrounded by his parents' rarefied personal and professional network. Their circle included a Cabinet secretary and a governor of Washington, according to "Hard Drive," the 1992 biography of Gates by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Brock Adams, who went on to become the transportation secretary in the Carter administration, is said to have introduced Gates' parents.)
His father, William Gates Sr., was a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle and the president of the Washington State Bar Association.
His mother, Mary Gates, came from a line of successful bankers and sat on the boards of important financial and social institutions, including the nonprofit United Way. It was there, according to her New York Times obituary, that she met the former IBM chairman John Opel — a fateful connection thought to have led to IBM enlisting Microsoft to provide an operating system in the 1980s.
"My parents were well off — my dad did well as a lawyer, took us on great trips, we had a really nice house," Gates said in the 2019 Netflix documentary "Inside Bill's Brain."
"And I've had so much luck in terms of all these opportunities."
Despite his very public life, his three children with French Gates — Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe — largely avoided the spotlight for most of their upbringing.
Like their father, the three Gates children attended Seattle's elite Lakeside School, a private high school that has been recognized for excellence in STEM subjects — and that received a $40 million donation from Bill Gates in 2005 to build its financial aid fund. (Bill Gates and Paul Allen met at Lakeside and went on to build Microsoft together.)
But as they have become adults, more details have emerged about their interests, professions, and family life.
While they have chosen different career paths, all three children are active in philanthropy — a space in which they will likely wield immense influence as they grow older. While Gates has reportedly said that he plans to leave each of his three children $10 million — a fraction of his fortune — they may inherit the family foundation, where most of his money will go.
Here's all we know about the Gates children.
Gates and his children did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Jennifer Gates Nassar
Jennifer Gates and Bill Gates at the Paris Olympic Games.
Jean Catuffe/Getty Images
Jennifer Gates Nassar, who goes by Jenn, is the oldest of the Gates children at 28 years old.
In 2018, Gates Nassar received her undergraduate degree in human biology from Stanford University, where a computer science building was named for her father after he donated $6 million to the project in 1996.
She then attended the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, from which she graduated in May. She will continue at Mt. Sinai for her residency in pediatric research. During medical school, she also completed a Master's in Public Health at Columbia University — perhaps a natural interest given her parents' extensive philanthropic activity in the space.
"Can't believe we've reached this moment, a little girl's childhood aspiration come true," she wrote on Instagram. "It's been a whirlwind of learning, exams, late nights, tears, discipline, and many moments of self-doubt, but the highs certainly outweighed the lows these past 5 years."
In October 2021, she married Egyptian equestrian Nayel Nassar. In February 2023, reports surfaced that they bought a $51 million New York City penthouse with six bedrooms and a plunge pool. The next month, they welcomed their first child, Leila, and in October, Gates Nassar gave birth to their second daughter, Mia.
"I'm over the moon for you, @jenngatesnassar and @nayelnassar—and overjoyed for our whole family," Bill Gates commented on the Instagram post announcing Mia's birth.
In a 2020 interview with the equestrian lifestyle publication Sidelines, Gates Nassar discussed growing up wealthy.
"I was born into a huge situation of privilege," she said. "I think it's about using those opportunities and learning from them to find things that I'm passionate about and hopefully make the world a little bit of a better place."
She recently posted about visiting Kenya, where she learned about childhood health and development in the country.
Rory John Gates
Rory Gates, the least public of the Gates children, has reportedly infiltrated powerful circles of Washington, D.C.
Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
Rory John Gates, who is in his mid-20s, is Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates' only son and the most private of their children. He maintains private social media accounts, and his sisters and parents rarely post photos of him.
His mother did, however, write an essay about him in 2017. Titled "How I Raised a Feminist Son," she describes as a "great son and a great brother" who "inherited his parents' obsessive love of puzzles."
In 2022, he graduated from the University of Chicago, where, based on a photo posted on Facebook, he appears to have been active in moot court. At the time of his graduation, Jennifer Gates Nassar wrote that he had achieved a double major and master's degree.
Little is publicly known about what the middle Gates child has been up to since he graduated, but a Puck report from last year gave some clues, saying that he is seen as a "rich target for Democratic social-climbers, influence-peddlers, and all variety of money chasers." According to OpenSecrets, his most recent public giving was to Nikki Haley last year.
The same report says he works as a congressional analyst while also completing a doctorate.
Phoebe Gates
Melinda Gates and Phoebe Gates.
John Nacion/Variety
Phoebe Gates, 22, is the youngest of the Gates children.
After graduating from high school in 2021, she followed her sister to Stanford. She graduated in June after three years with a Bachelor of Science in Human Biology. Her mom, Melinda French-Gates, delivered the university's commencement address.
In a story that Gates wrote for Nylon about her graduation day, she documented her graduation day, including a party she cohosted that featured speeches from her famous parents and a piggyback ride from her boyfriend Arthur Donald — the grandson of Sir Paul McCartney.
She has long shown an interest in fashion, interning at British Vogue and posting on social media from fashion weeks in Copenhagen, New York, and Paris. Sustainability is often a theme of her content, which highlights vintage and secondhand stores and celebrates designers who don't use real leather and fur.
That has culminated in her cofounding Phia, a sustainable fashion tech platform that launched in beta this fall. The site and its browser extension crawl secondhand marketplaces to find specific items in an effort to help shoppers find deals and prevent waste.
Gates shares her parents' passion for public health. She's attended the UN General Assembly with her mother and spent time in Rwanda with Partners in Health, a nonprofit that has received funding from the Gates Foundation.
Like her mother, Gates often publicly discusses issues of gender equality, including in essays for Vogue and Teen Vogue, at philanthropic gatherings, and on social media, where she frequently posts about reproductive rights.
She's given thousands to Democrats and Democratic causes, including to Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Democratic Party of Montana, per data from OpenSecrets. According to Puck, she receives a "giving allowance" that makes it possible for her to cut the checks.
Perhaps the most public of the Gates children — she's got over 450,000 Instagram followers and a partnership with Tiffany & Co. — she's given glimpses into their upbringing, including strict rules around technology. The siblings were not allowed to use their phones before bed, she told Bustle, and to get around the rule, she created a cardboard decoy.
"I thought I could dupe my dad, and it worked, actually, for a couple nights," she told the outlet earlier this year. "And then my mom came home and was like, 'This is literally a piece of cardboard you're plugging in. You're using your phone in your room.' Oh, my gosh, I remember getting in trouble for that."
It hasn't always been easy being Gates's daughter. In the Netflix documentary "What's Next? The Future With Bill Gates," she said she lost friends because of a conspiracy theory suggesting her father used COVID-19 vaccines to implant microchips into recipients.
"I've even had friends cut me off because of these vaccine rumors," she said.
Other Big Tech leaders have significantly changed up their looks since starting their companies; some are nearly unrecognizable (remember the Jeff-Bezos-is-jacked memes?)
Here's a look at the style transformations of some of tech's biggest names:
Jeff Bezos
Amazon has come a long way from just selling books, and its founder, Jeff Bezos, is also very different today.
Getty Images
Bezos founded Amazon from his garage in Bellevue, Washington, in 1994. Decades later, gone are the photoshoots where he's posing with a softcover while looking bookish.
Like Bezos, he's also gotten more fit. Part of Zuckerberg's physical transformation stems from hobbies like Brazilian jiu-jitsu and MMA fighting.
Michael Dell
Dell founded his company, initially called PC's Limited, in 1984 while still a student at the University of Texas in Austin.
Dell / Errich Petersen/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images
Dell is another member of the college dropouts-turned-tech founders club. He started his company while still enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin.
While you probably won't catch him rocking a t-shirt to a professional event, he's appeared to prefer to drop the glasses since then.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998.
Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images / Getty
Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998. They met as students at Stanford and built Google from a garage they rented from the late Susan Wojcicki, who was later YouTube's CEO.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk today runs several more companies than he did in 1999, when the photo on the left was taken.
AP / Richard Bord/WireImage via Getty Images
The photo at left shows Musk in 1999, around the time the "PayPal mafia" was formed.
Fun fact: The photo on the left is actually Gates' mugshot from when he got a speeding ticket without his license in 1977.
Oklahoma County Sheriff's Department/Getty Images / CHRIS JACKSON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Gates and the late Paul Allen cofounded Microsoft from a garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975.
Gates left Microsoft's board in 2020 and today spends more of his time focused on the philanthropic foundation he started with his now-ex-wife, Melinda French Gates.
Half a century later, he's still rocking glasses — with some different frames.
Jack Dorsey
Dorsey has been sporting a beard in the years since he stepped down as CEO of Twitter in 2021.
Kara Andrade/AFP via Getty Images / Joe Raedle/Getty
Twitter was founded in 2006. Cofounder Jack Dorsey has been seen with a full beard pretty regularly since departing as CEO and focusing his efforts more on cryptocurrency at Block, formerly Square.
Richard Branson
At left is Richard Branson in 1969, one year before he started the Virgin brand.
PA Images via Getty Images / Brendon Thorne/Getty Images
Richard Branson started the Virgin brand in 1970 with a mail-order record business.
At 73 years old today, Branson's day-to-day life still features plenty of exercise, from tennis and cycling to kite-surfing. As such, he's usually sporting a tan.
Jack Ma
New photos of Ma are scarce as he's been out of the limelight in recent years.
Liang Zhen/WireImage / Liu Yang/VCG via Getty Images
Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma disappeared from public view in 2020 after criticizing China's financial regulation system.
Anne Wojcicki is the CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe and the younger sister of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
Donald Bowers/Getty Images for The Weinstein Company / ETIENNE LAURENT/AFP via Getty Images
Anne Wojcicki cofounded genetic testing company 23andMe in 2006. She is the younger sister of late former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
Whitney Wolfe Herd
Whitney Wolfe Herd became the world's youngest self-made female billionaire after taking Bumble public.
Kate Warren for The Washington Post via Getty Images / Dipasupil/Getty Images
Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded Tinder before founding Bumble in 2014. She stepped down as CEO of the dating app last year.
Herd became the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world on the heels of Bumble's IPO.
The entrepreneur currently serves as executive chairman on Bumble's board of directors.
Evan Spiegel
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was the world's youngest billionaire in the year 2015, when he was 25 years old.
J. Emilio Flores/Corbis via Getty Images / Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Evan Spiegel co-founded Snap, which owns services like Snapchat, in 2011. The company's success made him the world's youngest billionaire in 2015, when he was 25.
While he'll often suit up or don a tux when attending a more formal event with his wife, Miranda Kerr, he's often seen in a white or black t-shirt and jeans.
Reed Hastings
Reed Hastings cofounded Netflix in 1997 with Marc Randolph.
Paul Sakuma/AP Images / Ore Huiying / Getty
Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph cofounded Netflix in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail service provider before it would become the streaming giant it is today. Hastings gave up the CEO title in January 2023, though he still serves as board chairman.
More recently, you can catch him in snowboarding attire after he bought a ski mountain in Utah.
Sam Altman
Altman's first startup was Loopt. Today, he leads OpenAI.
Jason Kempin/FilmMagic / Stefano Guidi/Getty Images
Altman is best known as the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, but his first startup was Loopt, a mobile service that allowed for real-time location sharing with friends.
The picture at left shows him in those days, circa 2006. In 2008, he was sporting two polo shirts with a double-popped collar on stage at Apple's WWDC conference. 15 years later, however, he's worn a tuxedo to the White House while continuing to keep it casual during interviews with more casual looks too.
Three of the "godfathers of AI" helped spark the revolution that's making its way through the tech industry — and all of society. They are, from left, Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yoshua Bengio.
Meta Platforms/Noah Berger/Associated Press
The field of artificial intelligence is booming and attracting billions in investment.
Researchers, CEOs, and legislators are discussing how AI could transform our lives.
Here are 17 of the major names in the field — and the opportunities and dangers they see ahead.
Investment in artificial intelligence is rapidly growing and on track to hit $200 billion by 2025. But the dizzying pace of development also means many people wonder what it all means for their lives.
In short, AI is a hot, controversial, and murky topic. To help you cut through the frenzy, Business Insider put together a list of what leaders in the field are saying about AI — and its impact on our future.
Geoffrey Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, is known as a "godfather of AI."
Geoffrey Hinton, a trailblazer in the AI field, quit his job at Google and said he regrets his role in developing the technology.
Noah Berger/Associated Press
Hinton's research has primarily focused on neural networks, systems that learn skills by analyzing data. In 2018, he won the Turing Award, a prestigious computer science prize, along with fellow researchers Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.
Hinton also worked at Google for over a decade, but quit his role at Google last spring, so he could speak more freely about the rapid development of AI technology, he said. After quitting, he even said that a part of him regrets the role he played in advancing the technology.
"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Hinton said previously.
Bengio's research primarily focuses on artificial neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning. In 2022, Bengio became the computer scientist with the highest h-index — a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author's scholarly output — in the world, according to his website.
In addition to his academic work, Bengio also co-founded Element AI, a startup that develops AI software solutions for businesses that was acquired by the cloud company ServiceNow in 2020.
Bengio has expressed concern about the rapid development of AI. He was one of 33,000 people who signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development. Hinton, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, and Elon Musk also signed the letter.
"Today's systems are not anywhere close to posing an existential risk," he previously said. "But in one, two, five years? There is too much uncertainty."
When that time comes, though, Bengio warns that we should also be wary of humans who have control of the technology.
Some people with "a lot of power" may want to replace humanity with machines, Bengio said at the One Young World Summit in Montreal. "Having systems that know more than most people can be dangerous in the wrong hands and create more instability at a geopolitical level, for example, or terrorism."
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has catapulted into a major figure in the area of artificial intelligence since launching ChatGPT last November.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is both optimistic about the changes AI will bring to society, but also says he loses sleep over the dangers of ChatGPT.
French computer scientist Yann LeCun has also been dubbed a "godfather of AI" after winning the Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio.
Yann LeCun, one of the godfathers of AI, who won the Turing Award in 2018.
Meta Platforms
LeCun is professor at New York University, and also joined Meta in 2013, where he's now the Chief AI Scientist. At Meta, he has pioneered research on training machines to make predictions based on videos of everyday events as a way to enable them with a form of common sense. The idea being that humans learn an incredible amount about the world based on passive observation. He's has also published more than 180 technical papers and book chapters on topics ranging from machine learning to computer vision to neural networks, according to personal website.
Fei-Fei Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and a former VP at Google.
Former Google VP Fe-Fei Li is known for establishing ImageNet, a large visual database designed for visual object recognition.
Greg Sandoval/Business Insider
Li's research focuses on machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and cognitively-inspired AI, according to her biography on Stanford's website.
She may be best known for establishing ImageNet — a large visual database that was designed for research in visual object recognition — and the corresponding ImageNet challenge, in which software programs compete to correctly classify objects. Over the years, she's also been affiliated with major tech companies including Google — where she was a VP and chief scientist for AI and machine learning — and Twitter (now X), where she was on the board of directors from 2020 until Elon Musk's takeover in 2022.
UC-Berkeley professor Stuart Russell has long been focused on the question of how AI will relate to humanity.
AI researcher Stuart Russell, who is a University of California, Berkeley, professor.
JUAN MABROMATA / Staff/Getty Images
Russell published Human Compatible in 2019, where he explored questions of how humans and machines could co-exist, as machines become smarter by the day. Russell contended that the answer was in designing machines that were uncertain about human preferences, so they wouldn't pursue their own goals above those of humans.
He's also the author of foundational texts in the field, including the widely used textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach," which he co-wrote with former UC-Berkeley faculty member Peter Norvig.
Russell has spoken openly about what the rapid development of AI systems means for society as a whole. Last June, he also warned that AI tools like ChatGPT were "starting to hit a brick wall" in terms of how much text there was left for them to ingest. He also said that the advancements in AI could spell the end of the traditional classroom.
Peter Norvig played a seminal role directing AI research at Google.
Stanford HAI fellow Peter Norvig, who previously lead the core search algorithms group at Google.
Peter Norvig
He spent several in the early 2000s directing the company's core search algorithms group and later moved into a role as the director of research where he oversaw teams on machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision.
Norvig has also rotated through several academic institutions over the years as a former faculty member at UC-Berkeley, former professor at the University of Southern California, and now, a fellow at Stanford's center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Norvig told BI by email that "AI research is at a very exciting moment, when we are beginning to see models that can perform well (but not perfectly) on a wide variety of general tasks." At the same time "there is a danger that these powerful AI models can be used maliciously by unscrupulous people to spread disinformation rather than information. An important area of current research is to defend against such attacks," he said.
Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist who’s become known for her work in addressing bias in AI algorithms.
After she departed from her role at Google in 2020, Timnit Gebru went on the found the Distributed AI Research Institute.
Kimberly White/Getty Images
Gebru was a research scientist and the technical co-lead of Google's Ethical Artificial Intelligence team where she published groundbreaking research on biases in machine learning.
But her research also spun into a larger controversy that she's said ultimately led to her being let go from Google in 2020. Google didn't comment at the time.
Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute in 2021 which bills itself as a "space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech's pervasive influence."
She's also warned that AI gold rush will mean companies may neglect implementing necessary guardrails around the technology. "Unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self-regulate," Gebru previously said. "We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive."
British-American computer scientist Andrew Ng founded a massive deep learning project called "Google Brain" in 2011.
Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng said he thinks AI will be part of the solution to existential risk.
Steve Jennings / Stringer/Getty Images
The endeavor lead to the Google Cat Project: A milestone in deep learning research in which a massive neural network was trained to detect YouTube videos of cats.
Ng also served as the chief scientist at Chinese technology company Baidu where drove AI strategy. Over the course of his career, he's authored more than 200 research papers on topics ranging from machine learning to robotics, according to his personal website.
Beyond his own research, Ng has pioneered developments in online education. He co-founded Coursera along with computer scientist Daphne Koller in 2012, and five years later, founded the education technology company DeepLearning.AI, which has created AI programs on Coursera.
"I think AI does have risk. There is bias, fairness, concentration of power, amplifying toxic speech, generating toxic speech, job displacement. There are real risks," he told Bloomberg Technology last May. However, he said he's not convinced that AI will pose some sort of existential risk to humanity — it's more likely to be part of the solution. "If you want humanity to survive and thrive for the next thousand years, I would much rather make AI go faster to help us solve these problems rather than slow AI down," Ng told Bloomberg.
Daphne Koller is the founder and CEO of insitro, a drug discovery startup that uses machine learning.
Daphne Koller, CEO and Founder of Insitro.
Insitro
Koller told BI by email that insitro is applying AI and machine learning to advance understanding of "human disease biology and identify meaningful therapeutic interventions." And before founding insitro, Koller was the chief computing officer at Calico, Google's life-extension spinoff. Koller is a decorated academic, a MacArthur Fellow, and author of more than 300 publications with an h-index of over 145, according to her biography from the Broad Institute, and co-founder of Coursera.
In Koller's view the biggest risks that AI development pose to society are "the expected reduction in demand for certain job categories; the further fraying of "truth" due to the increasing challenge in being able to distinguish real from fake; and the way in which AI enables people to do bad things."
At the same time, she said the benefits are too many and too large to note. "AI will accelerate science, personalize education, help identify new therapeutic interventions, and many more," Koller wrote by email.
Daniela Amodei cofounded AI startup Anthropic in 2021 after an exit from OpenAI.
Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei.
Anthropic
Amodei co-founded Anthropic along with six other OpenAI employees, including her brother Dario Amodei. They left, in part, because Dario — OpenAI's lead safety researcher at the time — was concerned that OpenAI's deal with Microsoft would force it to release products too quickly, and without proper guardrails.
At Anthropic, Amodei is focused on ensuring trust and safety. The company's chatbot Claude bills itself as an easier-to-use alternative that OpenAI's ChatGPT, and is already being implemented by companies like Quora and Notion. Anthropic relies on what it calls a "Triple H" framework in its research. That stands for Helpful, Honest, and Harmless. That means it relies on human input when training its models, including constitutional AI, in which a customer outlines basic principles on how AI should operate.
"We all have to simultaneously be looking at the problems of today and really thinking about how to make tractable progress on them while also having an eye on the future of problems that are coming down the pike," Amodei previously told BI.
Demis Hassabis has said artificial general intelligence will be here in a few years.
Demis Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of machine learning startup DeepMind.
After a handful of research stints, and a venture in videogames, he founded DeepMind in 2010. He sold the AI lab to Google in 2014 for £400 million where he's worked on algorithms to tackle issues in healthcare, climate change, and also launched a research unit dedicated to the understanding the ethical and social impact of AI in 2017, according to DeepMind's website.
Hassabis has said the promise of artificial general intelligence — a theoretical concept that sees AI matching the cognitive abilities of humans — is around the corner. "I think we'll have very capable, very general systems in the next few years," Hassabis said previously, adding that he didn't see why AI progress would slow down anytime soon. He added, however, that developing AGI should be executed in a "in a cautious manner using the scientific method."
In 2022, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman launched AI startup Inflection AI along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Karén Simonyan — now the company's chief scientist.
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, launched Inflection AI in 2022.
Inflection
The startup, which claims to create "a personal AI for everyone," most recently raised $1.3 billion in funding last June, according to PitchBook.
Its chatbot, Pi, which stands for personal intelligence, is trained on large language models similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT or Bard. Pi, however, is designed to be more conversational, and offer emotional support. Suleyman previously described it as a "neutral listener" that can respond to real-life problems.
"Many people feel like they just want to be heard, and they just want a tool that reflects back what they said to demonstrate they have actually been heard," Suleyman previously said.
USC Professor Kate Crawford focuses on social and political implications of large-scale AI systems.
USC Professor Kate Crawford is the author of Atlas of AI and a researchers at Microsoft.
Kate Crawford
Crawford is also the senior principal researcher at Microsoft, and the author of Atlas of AI, a book that draws upon the breadth of her research to uncover how AI is shaping society.
Crawford remains both optimistic and cautious about the state of AI development. She told BI by email she's excited about the people she works with across the world "who are committed to more sustainable, consent-based, and equitable approaches to using generative AI."
She added, however, that "if we don't approach AI development with care and caution, and without the right regulatory safeguards, it could produce extreme concentrations of power, with dangerously anti-democratic effects."
Margaret Mitchell is the chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face.
Margaret Mitchell has headed AI projects at several big tech companies.
Margaret Mitchell
Mitchell has published more than 100 papers over the course of her career, according to her website, and spearheaded AI projects across various big tech companies including Microsoft and Google.
In late 2020, Mitchell and Timnit Gebru — then the co-lead of Google's ethical artificial intelligence — published a paper on the dangers of large language models. The paper spurred disagreements between the researchers and Google's management and ultimately lead to Gebru's departure from the company in December 2020. Mitchell was terminated by Google just two months later, in February 2021
Now, at Hugging Face — an open-source data science and machine learning platform that was founded in 2016 — she's thinking about how to democratize access to the tools necessary to building and deploying large-scale AI models.
In an interview with Morning Brew, where Mitchell explained what it means to design responsible AI, she said, "I started on my path toward working on what's now called AI in 2004, specifically with an interest in aligning AI closer to human behavior. Over time, that's evolved to become less about mimicking humans and more about accounting for human behavior and working with humans in assistive and augmentative ways."
Navrina Singh is the founder of Credo AI, an AI governance platform.
Navrina Singh, the founder of Credo AI, says the system may help people reach their potential.
Navrina Singh
Credo AI is a platform that helps companies make sure they're in compliance with the growing body of regulations around AI usage. In a statement to BI, Singh said that by automating the systems that shape our lives, AI has the capacity "free us to realize our potential in every area where it's implemented."
At the same time, she contends that algorithms right now lack the human judgement that's necessary to adapt to a changing world. "As we integrate AI into civilization's fundamental infrastructure, these tradeoffs take on existential implications," Singh wrote. "As we forge ahead, the responsibility to harmonize human values and ingenuity with algorithmic precision is non-negotiable. Responsible AI governance is paramount."
Richard Socher, a former Salesforce exec, is the founder and CEO of AI-powered search engine You.com.
Richard Socher believes we're still years from achieving AGI.
You.com
Socher believes we have ways to go before AI development hits its peak or matches anything close to human intelligence.
One bottleneck in large language models is their tendency to hallucinate — a phenomenon where they convincingly spit out factual errors as truth. But by forcing them to translate questions into code — essential "program" responses instead of verbalizing them — we can "give them so much more fuel for the next few years in terms of what they can do," Socher said.
But that's just a short-term goal. Socher contends that we are years from anything close to the industry's ambitious bid to create artificial general intelligence. Socher defines it as "a form of intelligence that can "learn like humans" and "visually have the same motor intelligence, and visual intelligence, language intelligence, and logical intelligence as some of the most logical people," and it could take as little as 10 years, but as much as 200 years to get there.
And if we really want to move the needle toward AGI, Socher said humans might need to let go of the reins, and their own motives to turn a profit, and build AI that can set its own goals.
"I think it's an important part of intelligence to not just robotically, mechanically, do the same thing over and over that you're told to do. I think we would not call an entity very intelligent if all it can do is exactly what is programmed as its goal," he told BI.
Yankee Candle Founder lists house in Massachusetts
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Michael Kittredge II's son put the Yankee Candle founder's Massachusetts estate up for sale in 2022.
The compound, which features an indoor water park and bowling alley, was originally listed for $23 million.
After two years on the market, the estate could soon be redeveloped as senior living.
Three years after Yankee Candle founder Michael Kittredge II died in 2019, his son, Michael Kittredge III, put the family's sprawling 120,000-square-foot compound on the market for a whopping $23 million.
Now, after more than two years of no movement and a significant slash to its asking price, the historic Massachusetts estate could soon be transformed into an entirely different kind of living space. The Kittredge family has enlisted Josh Wallack, a Florida-based developer, to oversee the re-imagination of the mansion into a luxurious senior living community that features affordable housing.
In a conversation with Business Insider, Wallack outlined his vision for "Pioneer Point at Juggler Meadow: A 55+ Active Adult Community," a $200 million project that aims to incorporate all the amenities of the Kittredge estate into a community that helps address Massachusetts' housing crisis.
"This is going to be amazing. Regular people can buy one of these units and live in this amazing place that is like heaven on Earth," Wallack said.
Take a peak inside the mind-boggling compound.
The former home of Yankee Candle founder, the late Michael Kittredge II, went on the market in September 2022.
Yankee Candle Founder's estate goes up for sale
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The $23 million listing quickly went viral thanks to its litany of amenities.
The sprawling estate is located about two hours outside Boston in Leverett, Massachusetts.
Yankee Candle founder estate hits the market
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The estate encompasses 120,000 square feet of living space spread across eight separate structures, including a main house, a clubhouse, a spa, a pool cabana, two guest houses, and two car barns.
The main residence is a 25,000-square-foot house designed in the colonial style. It was originally constructed in the 1980s.
The compound sat on the market for months before its price was slashed from $23 million to $14.9 million.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
Courtesy of Surette Media Group
Wallack and his family stayed at the estate's guest home in 2022 after he hit it off with Michael "Mick" Kittredge III.
As an expert in rezoning, Wallack said the Kittredge family asked him what he thought they should do with the property.
"Instead of looking for one billionaire to buy this mansion, let's take all the land underneath it and build 700 homes and allow regular people to live here and use your father's mansion as the social club," Wallack said he told the family.
Wallack wants to turn the estate into an active senior living community.
Yankee Candle founder estate hits the market
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If approved, Wallack's plan would allow people 55 and older to buy individual units on the property, where they would have full access to amenities like an onsite restaurant, cafe, tennis and pickleball courts, and a beauty parlor.
The project would offer 25% of units at affordable housing rates.
Yankee Candle founder estate hits the market
Courtesy of Surette Media Group
Wallack said the community would be comprised of 25% of units at affordable housing costs and 75% of units at market rate.
Someone making $84,000 a year would pay about $1,875 a month for an affordable unit, Wallack said.
The budget for the project is about $200 million, Wallack said.
Yankee Candle founder estate hits the market
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Wallack serves as the development manager representing the Michael Kittredge trust.
The team is in the final stages of preparing an application to MassHousing.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
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Wallack is working to garner more community support.
Take a peak at the original mansion before it potentially is redesigned.
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The main residence has six full bathrooms and five half-bathrooms spread out between five bedrooms.
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The house features 11 fireplaces, including in some of the bathrooms.
The lower level of the house has a 10-seat movie theater.
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Kittredge was a car enthusiast who had two temperature-controlled car barns built at the estate.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
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The spa is a major attraction at the compound and houses a fitness center, as well as basketball and tennis courts.
Courtesy of Surette Media Group
Wallack said his project would turn some of those tennis courts into pickleball courts for senior residents.
Kittredge had three outdoor tennis courts and one indoor court constructed at the estate.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
Courtesy of Surette Media Group
The indoor tennis court also doubles as a concert venue, which has hosted such bands as The Doobie Brothers, as well as KC and The Sunshine Band.
The fitness center takes up 4,000 square feet and has multiple locker rooms.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
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A bowling alley is situated in the 55,000-square-foot spa.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
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The compound also has a two-story arcade.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
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In addition to an outdoor pool, the estate also has an indoor Bellagio-style water park.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
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It is full of slides, waterfalls, and palm trees.
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The real estate company that originally listed the compound said the estate is set up like a private country club and includes a nine-hole golf course.
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The clubhouse, which looks out on a pool and two cabanas, has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a full kitchen.
Yankee Candle founder's estate hits the market
Courtesy of Surette Media Group
The compound is also home to two guest houses.
Courtesy of Surette Media Group
"There was nothing he loved more than bringing his family and friends together and hosting parties at his home," Kittredge's son said in a 2022 press release.
Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund.
Bill Pugliano/Getty Images; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg might be cooling their long-simmering feud.
Zuckerberg and Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago and Meta donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund.
Here's a look at the timeline of Trump and Zuckerberg's rivalry.
Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg breaking bread together may have marked the beginning of a new chapter in their relationship.
Last month, Trump and Zuckerberg shared a Thanksgiving eve meal at the president-elect's Mar-a-Lago resort. Trump previously threatened to jail the Meta CEO if he won the 2024 election, illustrating just how important their tête-à-tête might be.
Trump and his conservative allies have long criticized Zuckerberg, putting the head of one of the nation's largest companies under a microscope at a critical time.
"It's an important time for the future of American Innovation. Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming Administration," a spokesperson for Meta previously said in a statement to Business Insider, confirming the dinner.
Meta is facing an antitrust trial next year. There's bipartisan support for a major rewrite of Section 230, a law that shields Big Tech companies from liability. Zuckerberg has previously supported changing Section 230, but his company could be dramatically affected by how the law is changed.
Like many in Silicon Valley, Zuckerberg quickly expressed concern for Trump after he survived a July assassination attempt. Trump reciprocated by falsely claiming Zuckerberg endorsed him. However, it was a major departure from threatening to jail the tech executive if he tried to influence the 2024 campaign.
Here's a look at how their relationship evolved over the years.
Trump and Zuckerberg have met on multiple occasions.
Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook in the Oval Office today.
"Mark is in Washington, D.C., meeting with policymakers to hear their concerns and talk about future internet regulation. He also had a good, constructive meeting with President Trump at the White House today," a Meta spokesperson said at the time.
"Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook in the Oval Office today," Trump said of their meeting.
Trump and Zuckerberg met again the following month.
PayPal Mafia member Peter Thiel also attended the private dinner with Trump and Zuckerberg.
"We talked about a number of things that were on his mind, and some of the topics that you read about in the news around our work," Zuckerberg said of the dinner in an interview with "CBS This Morning."
Zuckerberg was in DC to testify before Congress about Facebook's cryptocurrency, Libra.
Trump has said he would've banned Facebook while president, but Zuckerberg "kept calling" him.
Trump congratulated Nigeria for its ban on Twitter, which the country has since lifted.
"More COUNTRIES should ban Twitter and Facebook for not allowing free and open speech — all voices should be heard," Trump said in a statement at the time.
"Perhaps I should have done it while I was President," he added. "But Zuckerberg kept calling me and coming to the White House for dinner telling me how great I was."
Nigeria lifted its ban on Twitter after seven months.
Trump has lambasted Zuckerberg for indefinitely suspending his Facebook account after his remarks contributing to the January 6 Capitol insurrection.
Donald Trump (left) and the Facebook logo on mobile (right).
"His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world," Zuckerberg wrote in a post at the time. "We removed these statements yesterday because we judged that their effect -- and likely their intent -- would be to provoke further violence."
Meta in 2023 reinstated Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Meta uses public Instagram and Facebook photos to train its AI models
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In the time since the suspension, Facebook's Oversight Board examined the decision.
Eventually, Meta decided to reinstate Trump's account.
It did so while putting "new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses," including bigger penalties for any violations of Meta's rules.
As of July 2024, the company has lifted its final restrictions on Trump's account in the run-up to the November presidential election.
Meta removed "heightened suspension penalties" from Trump's account in July.
"In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for President on the same basis," Meta said in a statement at the time. "As a result, former President Trump, as the nominee of the Republican Party, will no longer be subject to the heightened suspension penalties."
Meta added that it would "review accounts subject to this protocol on a periodic basis to determine whether heightened suspension penalties for Community Standards violations remain appropriate."
Trump has expressed interest in suing Facebook.
Trump would later sue Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Scott Olson/Getty
"We should be suing Google and Facebook and all that," he said in a June 2019 interview with Fox Business. "Which, perhaps we will."
Trump made the remarks in the context of fines the European Union has levied against big tech firms like Google for breaching the bloc's antitrust rules.
In 2021, Trump did just that.
A combination photo of Facebook Google and Twitter logos.
"Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I've ever seen in my life," Zuckerberg told Bloomberg of the attempted Trump assassination. "On some level as an American, it's like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that's why a lot of people like the guy."
But the Meta CEO said he wasn't planning to endorse any candidate for president this election cycle.
Trump says Zuckerberg called him to apologize after Meta's AI chatbot denied the assassination attempt happened.
Meta AI's new integration gives you search suggestions.
Business Insider
When asked about the shooting, Meta AI, in some widely-circulated instances, claimed Trump wasn't shot.
"He actually apologized; he said they'd made a mistake," Trump said on "Mornings with Maria" on Fox Business. "He actually announced he's not going to support a Democrat because he can't because he respected me for what I did that day."
As for the Meta AI posts about the shooting, Meta said in a July blog post: "In both cases, our systems were working to protect the importance and gravity of this event. And while neither was the result of bias, it was unfortunate and we understand why it could leave people with that impression. That is why we are constantly working to make our products better and will continue to quickly address any issues as they arise."
Trump had threatened to imprison Zuckerberg.
Trump has threatened "Zuckerbucks" with prison time if he's elected in November.
"We already know who you are. DON'T DO IT! ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!" Trump wrote on Truth Social at the time.
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated roughly $400 million to nonprofits in 2020 to help state and local governments conduct a presidential election during an unprecedented pandemic. Republicans have remained furious over the donations. Meta has repeatedly tried to repair relationships, but many in the GOP remain incensed even though there's no evidence that the funds favored Democrats.
Amid continued criticism of his donations, Zuckerberg announced he would not make a similar contribution ahead of the 2024 election.
Trump mentioned Zuckerberg in his book, "Save America," and didn't mince words.
Donald Trump appeared to threaten Mark Zuckerberg with prison time.
Michael Ciaglo/ Getty Images; Carlos Barria/ REUTERS
Politico reported that Trump included a picture of himself with the Meta CEO, with the caption, "He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful Lock Boxes in a true PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT."
It's unclear when Trump wrote the caption, though he appears to be referring to a $420 million contribution Zuckerberg and his wife made to fund election infrastructure in 2020.
Trump changed his mind on a TikTok ban, seemingly because of how it would likely benefit Meta.
Trump backed a TikTok ban while in office but now says he is "for TikTok" because the alternatives are Zuckerberg's Facebook and Instagram.
"Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm for TikTok because you need competition," Trump told Bloomberg Businessweek in July. "If you don't have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram, and that's, you know, that's Zuckerberg."
"There's a lot of good and there's a lot of bad with TikTok," he said. "But the thing I don't like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger. And I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people."
Zuckerberg quickly congratulated Trump on his 2024 win.
Zuckerberg was among many high-profile CEOs who quickly congratulated Donald Trump after news organizations projected the former president had won the 2024 election.
Screenshot/Threads
Like other major CEOs, Zuckerberg quickly praised Trump after it became apparent that the former president had won the 2024 election.
"Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country," Zuckerberg wrote on Threads on November 6. "Looking forward to working with you and your administration."
They shared a pre-holiday meal, and Meta donated $1 million to his inauguration.
Trump's exclusive Mar-a-Lago club was the site of their meal.
Saul Martinez/Getty Images
Zuckerberg was invited to dine with Trump on Thanksgiving eve, a Meta spokesperson said.
The Meta CEO traveled to Mar-a-Lago, Trump's Palm Beach club nicknamed "The Winter White House." Trump has been holding meetings there with potential cabinet picks and other top staffers as he prepares to retake the White House in January.
The New York Times reported that Zuckerberg "initiated" the meeting.
Some in Trump's orbit are taking notice of Zuckerberg's efforts.
"Mark Zuckerberg has been very clear about his desire to be a supporter of this and a participant in this change that we're seeing all around America, all around the world with this reform movement that Donald Trump is leading," longtime Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who will also return to the White House, told Fox News.
Miller cautioned "we'll see what comes" of Zuckerberg's rapprochement but made clear that the Meta CEO "understands" the change Trump is seeking.
On December 11, The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta had donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund, telling his campaign of the plan ahead of the dinner between the billionaires.
