2016 Throwbacks Are Trending — Here’s What Tech Elites Were up to Then

A lot has changed for Elon Musk since 2016. The Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder is now worth over half a trillion dollars and wields extraordinary influence across the worlds of business and politics. But 10 years ago, he had a net worth of just over $11 billion, expressed little interest in politics, and was better known as an ambitious entrepreneur pioneering clean energy and rocket technology.

In July 2016, Musk released Tesla’s “masterplan part deux,” which outlined the company’s goals of building more affordable EVs and rolling out fleets of self-driving cars that make money for Tesla owners even when they’re not using them. While Tesla has achieved the first goal, introducing the Model 3 and Y and dominating the US EV market, the second has proven more elusive.

Musk also spent 2016 helping set up a mysterious new startup with an ambitious mission of building superintelligent AI — OpenAI. A decade later, he’s suing the company and his former cochair, Sam Altman, over claims he was misled over the ChatGPT maker’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission.

It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg’s personal look that’s changed over the last decade — his company has a completely different name.

In 2016, Facebook was focused on social media and advertising growth. After rebranding to Meta in 2021 to focus on the metaverse, the company today is all in on the AI boom. Oh, and Zuckerberg wears chains now.

A decade ago, Facebook was starting to come under scrutiny for its political influence, including the 2016 election that put Donald Trump in the White House. That’s changed. Now, Zuckerberg openly embraces the Trump administration, and Meta this month hired his former advisor and official.

Zuckerberg was already a billionaire tech elite in 2016, but today he is the sixth-richest person in the world with a net worth of $220 billion, according to Bloomberg data.

While Altman was influential in Silicon Valley in 2016, he was nowhere near the global name he is today. In 2016, Altman was leading the transformation of startup seed accelerator Y Combinator as its president, having launched a VC arm, a fellowship program, and a research lab.

The year before, Altman and Musk became co-chairs of OpenAI, having formed part of the team that founded the company. The company had already raised $1 billion in 2015 toward conducting research to benefit humanity. At the time, Altman told Business Insider that OpenAI’s specific research goals were still being debated.

Altman launched the website Voteplz in 2016 to streamline the voting process in the presidential election, and said in a tweet he was voting against Trump because he believed “the principles he stands for represent an unacceptable threat to America.”

Despite this early opposition, Altman lauded Trump last year as a “pro-business, pro-innovation president”.

Same leather jacket. A whole different status. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, may have kept the same style, but his company has evolved from a gaming chip giant into the world’s most valuable company that’s also critical to the AI boom.

The graphics processing units designed by Nvidia were mostly sold to gamers in 2016, but its chips were already being used in AI research labs. Now they are stacked up in data centers across the world to power AI models like ChatGPT. They have become so important to the global economy that any signs of weakness in Nvidia’s results prompt fears of an AI bubble.

Despite founding the world’s most valuable company, his net worth of $155 billion puts him in ninth place on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. Still, that’s a huge jump from his net worth of about $3 billion at the end of 2016.

Philanthropy continues to dominate Bill Gates’ public life. The Microsoft cofounder has ramped up donations through the Gates Foundation — formerly known as The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — as part of his plan to give away nearly all his wealth over the next 20 years.

In 2016, Gates was the richest person in the world with a net worth of $87.4 billion. With his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, the two dedicated their 2016 annual letter to clean-energy development, writing about making zero-carbon emissions a priority and bringing energy to the world’s poorest people.

The foundation focused on eliminating HIV, malaria, and other infectious diseases — a mission that has continued to 2026.

In 2016, Amazon was already dominating the online retail market, and Jeff Bezos was still the company’s CEO.

Despite a barrage of negative media attention the year before based on reports that Amazon warehouses were high-pressure, toxic work environments — claims Bezos disputed — the company’s dominance in cloud was growing. This trajectory has continued with Amazon Web Services seeing a 20% cloud sales growth in the third quarter of 2025, with plans to double capacity by the end of 2027.

Bezos said in 2016 that his ambition for his space technology company, Blue Origin, was to move heavy, polluting industry away from Earth to one day save the planet. In November 2025, the firm had its first successful booster recovery, bringing Blue Origin closer to rivaling SpaceX’s reusable rockets.

Bezos was still married to MacKenzie Scott before the two filed for divorce in 2019. He stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021 and married Lauren Sánchez in a lavish multi-day celebration in Venice in June 2025.