What a year! (It’s only January.)

TL;DR: It’s the end of a very long, eventful first month of 2026, and we’ve compiled a list of some of the most unhinged takes, tone-deaf reversals, and self-owns from the tech industry so far—from Sam Altman’s 180 on ChatGPT ads to Satya Nadella learning the hard way what happens when you tell the internet to stop doing something.

What happened: Congratulations, you made it to the end of January. There’s only 11 more months to go—but we’ve already seen enough head-scratching moves and heard enough baffling sound bites from tech founders, CEOs, and criminal biotech entrepreneurs to last a lifetime.

The following list runs from mildly amusing AI prognostications to whiplash-inducing hypocrisy and a profound inability to read the room. Two honorable mentions from 2025: Altman can’t imagine raising a newborn without ChatGPT, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp, quoting a political scientist, says the “rise of the West” was made possible “by its superiority in applying organized violence.” Chilling words in 2026. If we had one piece of advice to give these founders, it might be to avoid appearing on any more podcasts or late night shows for the time being.

• Elon’s… optimistic predictions. Recently, the Tesla CEO claimed that one day there would be an army of brilliant Optimus robot surgeons to give us all “access to medical care that is better than what the President receives right now.” Oh, and stop contributing to your 401(k). Thanks to AI, Elon says society will soon progress past the need for retirement savings, or money, for that matter. The economy of 2046 will obviously run on Bezos Bucks.
• Sam Altman vs. Sam Altman. In late 2024, the OpenAI CEO said he thought of ads in ChatGPT as a “last resort for us as a business model.” Well, apparently life comes at you fast. A little over a year later, the company announced it was, in fact, putting ads in its popular chatbot—and might charge about triple what Meta typically does. These are very reasonable prices that clearly have nothing to do with the billions of dollars OpenAI is burning every second.
• Nadella meets the Streisand Effect. At the very end of December, the Microsoft CEO wrote a blog post waxing poetic about AI in 2026. In it, he suggests people stop thinking of AI as “slop” and instead as “bicycles for the mind.” (We’re still not sure what that means.) How did the internet react? In true Reddit fashion, people began calling the Copilot-maker “Microslop,” and there’s even a Chrome extension that will convert every mention of “Microsoft” to its new pejorative nickname.
• AI skeptics hurt Jensen Huang’s feelings. In early January, Huang said on a podcast that criticisms of AI were “extremely hurtful” and not helpful to society. More like not helpful to his company’s share price, considering Nvidia is essentially the duct tape holding the whole AI industry (don’t call it a bubble) together. Again, the internet predictably mocked the Nvidia founder and centibillionaire.
• AI leader discovers tortured metaphors. At Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a melodramatic statement: Selling AI chips to China “is crazy” and akin to “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.” Cut to: Huang on the verge of tears. Move over, Lockheed Martin—Nvidia is the new weapons manufacturer in town.
• Making art is such a chore. Mikey Shulman, the CEO of controversial AI music generation app Suno, declared on a podcast that people “don’t enjoy” making music. “It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software,” he said. In other words, thank God we have AI to offload the irritating burden of creative expression.
• An Elizabeth Holmes jump scare. The disgraced Theranos founder popped back up like a groundhog predicting six more years of egregious tech fraud, writing on X, “People thought what we were doing was a fraud because they couldn't do the same!! Turns out Theranos was just 10;years ahead.” In other words, if she hadn’t lied and messed with people’s health, people would be applauding her now. It’s the famous “if my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike” defense.

We’ll check back in at the end of the year to crown the most ridiculous tech figure of 2026—and whether any of their forecasts came to pass. There's probably already a prediction market for it on Kalshi. —WK