Link: https://fortune.com/2026/02/21/peter-thiel-bill-gates-steve-jobs-steve-chen-tech-billionaires-publicly-shielding-their-children-from-tech-products-social-media/

Despite building an increasingly screen-focused world, billionaire tech leaders are keeping their own children away from the tech they helped create.

As far back as 2010, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter his kids had never used an iPad and that, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

Since then, the trend of Silicon Valley billionaires keeping their families away from technology has become even more pronounced, thanks in part to the rise of social media and short-form video.

Excessive device use among children has become more common in recent years as busy parents turn to screens to find some peace. The trend has accelerated so much that some young children accustomed to extensive screen time are dubbed “iPad kids.” On average, children in the U.S. ages 8 to 18 spend 7.5 hours per day watching or using screens, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

If you want to know whether a product is any good, ask yourself whether the company or its officers would use it.

For example, for many years, Hotmail servers ran BSD, because Microsoft knew better than to run a critical service on Windows servers.

To be fair, Hotmail wasn't built by them to begin with. Wasn't it an acquisition?

Don't get high on your own supply as they say.

Hotmail was purchased. They converted it to the product that became exchange online, one of the best products they make.

Yes it was. But as far as I remember, they tried to migrate to Windows and gave up?

I remember something about a campells soup (or other soup?) executive saying that they won't even eat their own companies product because it was gross and for poor people. I guess they tried it one day and were disgusted by it. But they'll keep selling it because $$$.

google doesn't dogfood k8s. It helps fuel my conspiracy that k8s is a premature scaling trap to saddle the startup competition with 300-500k worth of devops spend each.

That was Campbell’s soup. I so happened to have a cold recently and I actually missed having Campbell’s soup as a kid when I was sick (despite kind of despising canned foods now) but decided to buy Amy’s Kitchen soups instead when I recalled that article.

google doesn't dogfood k8s

Not many do, I'd imagine.

That's not a high bar

Did you take your pills today?

Just because you don't understand what I said doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with me, believe it or not.

Google uses Borg internally. k8s is for outsiders.

as another tech worked, that was a real sentence.

dog food is gesturing at the idea that you should eat your own dog food. The idea being if it's so high quality, you eat it yourselves.

k8s is a technology that scales servers. it's a bitch and a half to run smoothly, and takes a team (read lots of money) to wrestle.

Kubernetes

To be fair K8s was created by the Borg creators as a public version of Borg.