Making any year interesting for a tech journalist are some of the lessons that are taught. Like the downfall of a billionaire can happen overnight. Here are seven lessons 2023 taught us.

Don’t delete conversations

Google faced a crushing defeat in the antitrust litigation against Epic Games. But in the same year, Apple won (on most grounds) a case on similar lines against Epic Games. How can that happen? Here’s the deal, there’s some method to the madness in the case of Apple, which has the same policy for everyone, like sideloading is not allowed.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney

One of the issues that popped up during the trial was how Google dealt with evidence. Epic time and again pointed out that Google probably didn’t preserve all of their business communications. Google had set some one-on-one chats to automatically delete themselves after 24 hours by default and this didn’t go down well with all the jury members.

No device is less powerful

The trailer of Grand Theft Auto 6 was one of the most looked forward to moment. It got leaked by a teenage hacker. How? Arion Kurtaj was able to breach the video game creator’s system using a hotel TV and Amazon Fire Stick. The 18-year-old was, in fact, in police protection at a Travelodge hotel when he obtained 90 unreleased clips of GTA 6 from Rockstar Games. He didn’t have his laptop with him, so he used an Amazon Fire Stick and a “newly purchased smartphone, keyboard and mouse”.

GTA 6

Be suspicious of tech bros in shorts

The unkempt hair, wrinkled cargo shorts and T-shirts were part of Sam Bankman-Fried’s wardrobe until he was arrested and convicted of seven charges of fraud and conspiracy, giving the crypto industry a bad name. He became the symbol of crypto’s excesses and he was charged with stealing as much as $10 billion from customers. Even in 2022, he was worth more than $20 billion and his face was on billboards and magazine covers. His FTX was valued at $32 billion at its peak and it was one of the world’s biggest marketplaces for people to buy and sell digital coins like Bitcoin and Ether.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX

Words and actions are not the same

Elon Musk has said the darnest of things and made some of the worst decisions of the year as far as X (formerly Twitter) goes but he is ending the year richer than before. X is more of a playground for Musk whose financial security comes in the form of his other two companies, Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla stock prices continue to rise and SpaceX continues to grow, thanks to several successful launches and by providing satellite Internet.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff

Be careful of bosses taking digital detox

Salesforce announced a round of layoffs in January. The New York Times reported that just before the chopping-board routine, CEO Marc Benioff went for a digital detox while Business Insider reported that it was done in the months before the shook-up took place. Either way, the CEO thought it would be wise to cut off unnecessary communications for a while. “We are so addicted to our devices (at least I am) it’s very freeing to leave them all behind for a while,” he said.

HBO chairman Casey Bloys

Bosses too have secret digital armies

Casey Bloys is one of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry. The chairman and CEO of HBO was working from home — like any of us — in 2020 and 2021. At that point, he was president of original programming and he was angered by a tweet (yes, Twitter was still Twitter) from Vulture TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk, who had an opinion about Perry Mason, HBO’s series starring Matthew Rhys. Bloys asked a fake Twitter account to be created (check at once if Kelly Shepard, a self-described vegan Texan mom, is following you!) to tackle TV critics. In November, Bloys apologised for what he had done.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Call the bluff

In June, the owner of X Elon Musk challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a cage match after the latter decided to debut Threads, a new social media platform to tackle X. Instead of backing out, Zuckerberg, who is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu expert, agreed at once. After weeks of dilly-dallying Musk backed out.

— Mathures Paul