Not Just Sam Altman, Steve Jobs And These 4 Other Founders Were Also Fired From Their Own Companies

OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman’s firing from the AI startup in November has continued to dominate headlines for several months since then, but he’s not the only founder to have been fired from his own company.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for founders to be fired, but many legendary icons of the tech industry have faced this at some point.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is perhaps the most prominent instance of a founder being booted out from his own company, Apple Inc., which he co-founded in 1977. The legendary tech personality had a brewing power struggle with the company’s board and the CEO that he brought in, John Sculley.

Jobs then went on to founding NeXT Computer, before returning to Apple in 1997 and saving it from the brink of bankruptcy.

Mike Lazaridis

Mike Lazaridis founded BlackBerry, initially known as Research In Motion, in 1984, when he was still in the University of Waterloo as an engineering student. He dropped out two months before graduating after bagging a contract from General Motors to develop a product.

He served in various positions as BlackBerry’s co-CEO and co-chairman between 1984 and 2012 but stepped down after he couldn’t overcome the challenge posed by Apple’s iPhone.

Travis Kalanick

Travis Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 with Canadian entrepreneur Garrett Camp. The two came together to found Uber after Camp’s frustration with taxi services in San Francisco when he visited Kalanick.

However, eight years after running Uber, Kalanick stepped down as the company’s CEO following an investigation into allegations of harassment at the company.

Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter, now X, in 2007. However, teething troubles during the early days of the social media platform led to him being forced to step down as the CEO.

He was brought back in 2015 and remained Twitter’s CEO until 2021.

Jerry Yang

Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo! in 1994, making it among the first few companies to launch on the internet, merely a year after CERN took the world’s first website live.

Yang was “Chief Yahoo” alongside his co-founder David Filo for most of his stay at the company, but he was named the interim CEO of the company 13 years after it was founded, in 2007. He remained in that position until 2009 and eventually left Yahoo! in 2012.

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