Amazing how these are two of the most powerful men currently in existence and they bicker like children.
Expect it to get worse in the AI era because it comes with flattery as default.
Well, ideally in their case, no man leaves, but getting rid of half of them would be a good start.
When there is something genuinely acknowledged as being valuable - and a $900B company certainly qualifies - people are going to fight over it. Only natural, because in most cases the way to get power is to fight for things that will make you powerful. Just look at the history of Facebook or Twitter or Google Chauffeur/Waymo or Cisco or the U.S. presidency.
When you get wealth and power without fighting, it's usually because you managed to identify something that would eventually make you powerful without anyone else realizing that it's important, until you become too big to overthrow. This is the story of the Google founders or E-bay or Github or...I can't really think of others, it's a pretty rare path to success. Either that, or seem non-threatening and mild-mannered enough that nobody attacks you and then be the last one standing after all the combative types have destroyed each other, like how Sundar got to be CEO of Alphabet or Bran Stark won the Seven Kingdoms.
any background on the game of thrones played inside google for Sundar to get there?
Over the 5 years between 2010-2015, the search PM/TLM org chain basically revolted and said "We can't get anything done when Marissa tells us to do it one way and Amit says no, we have to do it another way". Marissa was moved to run Geo and then eventually left to become CEO of Yahoo. Amit himself got canned over a few sexual harassment complaints. Alan Eustace retired, as everyone expected. Andy Rubin made some ill-faited acquisitions of Motorola and Boston Dynamics that lost him a lot of cred, and then the nail in his coffin was when the media discovered his sex dungeon [2][3]. GFiber failed to gain significant traction, so Milo wasn't really a viable successor candidate (arguably he wasn't really in the running, and was there just to run Google's ISP ambitions). Anthony Levandowski stole Google's trade secrets on self-driving cars and sold them to Uber; he was criminally convicted for this but was pardoned by President Trump and is now founding a religion [4]. Sebastion Thrun left to found Udacity.
Sundar, meanwhile, steadily delivered on Toolbar, and then Chrome, and then took over Android when Andy Rubin was ousted, and steadily improved Android as well. He was unremarkable on the product front, but had a reputation as a peacemaker among Google's more volatile execs, as well as a very good translator of Larry's brilliant ideas into terms that mere mortals could understand. When he became CEO, it wasn't because he was remarkable, but because he was unremarkable enough to manage a number of remarkable personalities that had the egos to go along with it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Eustace#Stratosphere_jump
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-paid-35million-former-ex...
[3] https://mashable.com/article/andy-rubin-sex-ring-court-docs
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Levandowski#Criminal_c...
Power doesn't always look like what you think it does.
Although money might not be a proxy, musk is #1 net worth, altman isn't top 1000.