Tech CEOs who once worked for their competitors

In the fast-paced world of technology, competition often breeds innovation and sometimes, unexpected career twists.

Many of today’s most powerful tech CEOs once worked for or collaborated with their rivals before leading their own empires.

From Elon Musk’s early association with OpenAI to Satya Nadella’s rise from a Microsoft rival, these stories show how crossing enemy lines can sometimes lead straight to the top.

Satya Nadella

Before becoming one of the most respected tech leaders in the world, Satya Nadella started his career at Sun Microsystems, one of Microsoft’s fiercest competitors during the 1990s.

Sun was known for its dominance in the server and workstation market, the very space Microsoft sought to conquer.

Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992, helping to transform its cloud and enterprise computing divisions.

When he became CEO in 2014, he guided Microsoft into a new era, turning the company into a cloud powerhouse and boosting its market value past $3 trillion.

Elon Musk

Before leading Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk was one of the founding members of OpenAI in 2015.

Musk left the board in 2018, citing potential conflicts of interest with Tesla’s AI ambitions.

Years later, the rivalry between Musk and OpenAI intensified after Musk launched xAI, a direct competitor developing generative AI models.

Once a supporter of OpenAI’s mission to democratise AI, Musk is now one of its most vocal critics, accusing it of straying from its original goals.

Sundar Pichai

Long before becoming Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai worked on software tools and used Microsoft’s products extensively during his engineering years.

When he joined Google in 2004, his work on Chrome directly challenged Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, marking the beginning of Google’s dominance in browsers.

Now, Pichai oversees Alphabet’s vast ecosystem, competing head-to-head with Microsoft in AI, search, and cloud technology.