At a time when Big Tech is being pulled up by governments around the world, company leaders are trying to take cautious steps, except Elon Musk. There are opportunities in the form of AI-related tech as well as growing services business.
Elon Musk
It has been a bad, terrible, horrible year for Elon Musk. He had a lot to say about everything but ultimately X (formerly Twitter), under his ownership, has floundered and there is a trust issue, from the standpoint of advertisers as well as users.
His latest controversial move has been allowed right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to return to the platform X, which banned him more than five years ago for posting harassing messages. Jones has spent years promoting the claim that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 was a hoax and later he was ordered to pay nearly $1.5 billion to the families of eight victims of the massacre for defamation.
At the beginning of 2023, everyone thought X will improve its image but since then, several brands have left the platform. Last month, Musk said his anti-Semitic post on X was the “worst and dumbest I’ve ever done” but it was too late as several advertisers decided to pause spending, including Disney. Speaking at the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York, the owner of social media site X, said: “If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f**k yourself. Go. F**k. Yourself. Is that clear?” He went on to single out Disney CEO Bob Iger in the audience by saying: “Hi Bob!”
On top of this, X has a large debt to pay, which Musk took on to buy the platform. And there was the fiasco around blue checkmarks, which now can be had by anyone for a fee. Taking advantage of the situation has been Meta, which has a new product called Threads and it’s doing well.
Musk, who was named Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2021, has offered some advice to this year’s winner, Taylor Swift. “Some risk of popularity decline after this award. I speak from experience lol,” he has posted.
Mark Zuckerberg
Not that he ever went away, but his fortunes were down before the year began. The dark clouds are fading. He has regained quite a lot of wealth in 2023, up $72.7 billion through December 7, according to Bloomberg. Recently, he sold Meta stock worth $185 billion according to Bloomberg. Meta has been one of the top-performing stocks of the year, surging almost 172 per cent till November and outperforming all major companies except Nvidia.
He made news by starting a new platform called Threads, built by the Instagram team. In the first seven hours of its launch, 10 million users signed up, dealing a blow to its rival, X. To offer perspective, X (then Twitter) needed over two years to reach its first 10 million users.
The success of Threads made Elon Musk invite Zuckerberg to a ‘cage match’, which the Meta founder readily took on but Musk, obviously, didn’t show up.
Sam Altman
What a year it has been for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. His company’s AI system, ChatGPT, picked up one million users soon after it launched in November last year and now has over 100 million users. But the moment for him was when he was sacked by the old board at OpenAI on November 17, saying that the 38-year-old failed to be “consistently candid in his communications” with its members, without giving further details about the alleged breaches of trust. Within days, the company had a number of interim CEOs, and ultimately Altman returned quashing the boardroom coup.
Was the old board at OpenAI concerned by the capabilities of a new AI model being worked on the company before the CEO was fired? Nobody knows. Altman, who had reportedly demanded a new board as a precondition for his return, got what he wanted.
Satya Nadella
As the CEO of Microsoft, credit goes to him for making a clever investment — in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Microsoft now has a non-voting observer seat on OpenAI’s board. He sped up his plans to incorporate AI into Microsoft’s products and give Google a jolt. After investing $1 billion in 2019, Microsoft slowly started seeing the potential of OpenAI. It was at the end of summer 2022 that Nadella asked his top executives to meet at Building 34 and two months later Sam Altman decided to release ChatGPT.
Tim Cook
The way he guided his company through the pandemic, ensuring Apple’s valuation continues to march forward, is a lesson worth talking about. Apple shareholders had a great 2023 and the stock gained 50 per cent through early December and is sitting near its all-time highs as the year draws to a close. There are a few things to talk about. First, after years of planning, the company’s retail plan for India rolled out with the opening of Apple BKC in Mumbai, followed by Apple Saket in Delhi.
Second, Apple’s first new product in almost a decade was announced. Called Apple Vision Pro, the headset marks the beginning of an era of “spatial computing”. It can be made to work using the users’ hands, eyes and voice. After all, hand controllers are clumsy, Apple said, taking a dig at its rivals.
Third, the iPhone 15 series is turning out to be a feather in the cap as the Pro models have video capabilities that were previously unthinkable for the smartphone.
Fourth, Apple’s services business continues to climb. Its latest earnings report had something interesting to suggest — consumers may cut down on certain costs (like maybe buying fewer iPhones unless necessary) but nobody minds spending on essential services. The iPhone, which comprises half of Apple’s overall revenue even though it was introduced in 2007, continues to be a strong contender in the tech landscape but, at the same time, Apple is turning out to be a strong contender in the services space, so much so that it now has more than a billion paid subscriptions across all of its services, including Apple Music, iCloud, Apple News, Apple TV+ and more.
Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, has been the dark knight. Fueled by excitement around artificial intelligence, semiconductor company Nvidia skyrocketed to a trillion-dollar market cap earlier this year. The firm makes the chips that power AI software and is very important to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Elon Musk’s Tesla. During this year’s New York Times DealBook Summit, he was asked if he expected to see AGI in the next 10 years. “By depending on how you define it, I think the answer is yes. I would say that within the next five years, you’re gonna see, obviously, AIs that can achieve those tests,” Huang said.
The EU has made some landmark judgments to govern Big Tech
The European Union
The EU has shown how Big Tech can be curbed. The appearance of Digital Markets Act has put curbs on so-called gatekeeper platforms, which are defined by factors like a market value of more than Euro 75 billion, meaning it covers Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube; Amazon; Apple; Microsoft; and Meta. According to DMA, the real power should lie with the user when it comes to the kind of data they want to share or the seamless manner in which one can move from one platform to another. Here are a few areas in which DMA has had a direct (or indirect) influence.
Recently, the EU agreed on the terms for landmark legislation — AI Act — to regulate artificial intelligence and it contains rules for people building and using AI. The proposed EU AI Act is the most sweeping rulebook that includes bans on biometric systems that identify people using elements such as sexual orientation, race, religion or political beliefs and the scraping of faces from the Internet.
