The most outlandish tech CEO quotes from 2025

Tech CEOs are the great showmen of our time, and when they took to the stage this year — on investor calls, conferences, podcasts, or unintentionally public private all-hands meetings — they did not disappoint.

Here’s a roundup of some of the most outrageous and memorable tech CEO quotes of the year:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” demonstrating that billionaire tech CEO parents are just like us:

“I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doing his best Atlas impression during a leaked all-hands in November:

“If we delivered a bad quarter, if we’re off by just a hair, if it just looked a little bit creaky, the whole world would’ve fallen apart. There’s no question about that, OK? You should’ve seen some of the memes that are on the internet. Have you guys seen some of them? We’re basically holding the planet together — and it’s not untrue.”

CEO Elon Musk at Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting, in peak hyperbolic form alongside dancing Optimus robots:

“Optimus will ultimately be better than the best human surgeon with a level of precision that is impossible — that is beyond human… People always talked about eliminating poverty, but actually Optimus will actually eliminate poverty.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the company’s third-quarter earnings call, terrifying his children:

“And of course, we use all of the large language models. They’re all great. We love all of them. We love all of our children. But they’re also all just commodities, and we can have the choice of choosing whatever one we want, whether it’s OpenAI or Gemini or Anthropic or what — there’s other open-source ones. They’re all very good at this point, so we can swap them in and out.”

And on a podcast showing humanity regarding layoffs:

“I was able to rebalance my headcount on my support. I’ve reduced it from 9,000 heads to about 5,000 because I need less heads.”

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott saving souls in an interview with Bloomberg TV:

“We’re slowing down the hiring in jobs that are — quite frankly — soul-crushing jobs… The supporting cast of the soul-crushing work is now being done by agents. They work hard 24 by 7, you don’t have to pay ’em, and they don’t need any lunch, and they don’t have any healthcare benefits, so they’re very affordable and that really complements our workforce.”

Xiaoyin Qu, founder and (former?) CEO of heyBoss.ai, perfecting an AI publicity stunt on LinkedIn:

“Today, I’m stepping down as CEO of heyBoss.ai

Taking my place is Astra —an AI leader we’ve built, and world’s first AI CEO.

This wasn’t a quick call; it’s one of my toughest decisions, shaped by months of testing and hard-earned lessons. 

We put Astra to work with real customers. Their feedback hit hard: ‘She’s faster, smarter, more reliable than you.’”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a father to three daughters, telling Joe Rogan that businesses could be manlier:

“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered... Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it.”

Palmer Luckey, CEO of Anduril Industries, on Fox News making the case for AI-powered warfare:

“When it comes to life and death decision-making, I think that it is too morally fraught an area, it is too critical of an area, to not apply the best technology available to you, regardless of what it is... To me, there’s no moral high ground in using inferior technology, even if it allows you to say things like, ‘We never let a robot decide who lives and who dies.’”

Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies, making the “AI revolution” sound like a literal revolution on an earnings call:

“We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir... Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working. There’ll be ups and down. This is a revolution. Some people can get their heads cut off.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei prematurely scaring off IT grads at a Council of Foreign Relations event in March:

“We’re not far from a world — I think we’ll be there in three to six months — where AI is writing 90% of the code. And then in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explaining AWS growth so thoroughly he wiped nearly $100 billion of the company’s market cap:

“We have a meaningfully larger business in the AWS segment than others. I think the second player is about 65% of the size of AWS. And when we look at the results over the last number of quarters, there are some times we’re, as far as we can tell, we’re growing faster than others, and sometimes others are growing faster than us. But it's still like ,if you look at the second place player, you’re talking about, it’s a pretty — it’s still a pretty significant segment, market segment leadership position that we have.

And regardless, these are all really just moments in time. The last week is a moment in time, too, where the reality of what really matters is what customers’ experiences are in operating on these platforms.”

Serial tech founder and one-time CEO of PayPal, Peter Thiel, giving a casual lecture series on the Antichrist:

“How might such an Antichrist rise to power? By playing on our fears of technology and seducing us into decadence with the Antichrist's slogan: peace and safety.”