- Some of the most powerful tech execs have been surprisingly candid about raising their children.
- Here’s a look at some parenting philosophies of the biggest names in tech.
So how do the people creating tomorrow’s technologies think about raising children for the world those technologies are helping create?
Here’s what some of the biggest names in tech have said about their approach to raising children.
Sam Altman
The OpenAI CEO told Jimmy Fallon that ChatGPT has helped him raise his baby. Altman said he “cannot imagine” having figured out how to parent a newborn without the technology. He’s asked, for example, why his kid wasn’t crawling at a certain age.
And when it comes to cribs, Altman has said he has a clear favorite: Cradlewise. It costs nearly $2,000 and gently bounces the baby to head off any fussing. The crib also includes a built-in baby monitor and music features.
Altman also said he’s learned the importance of having a lot of burp rags.
Mark Zuckerberg
When asked in 2024 what kids should be studying today, Zuckerberg told Bloomberg that “the most important thing is learning how to think critically and learning values when you’re young.”
“This is somewhat of a hiring philosophy that I have, too,” he said. “If people have shown that they can go deep and do one thing really well, then they’ve probably gained experience in the art of learning something and taking it to an excellent level.”
He also said in a 2024 interview that, when taking his then-seven-year-old daughter to a Taylor Swift concert, he told her that being like the superstar wasn’t “available” to her. A therapist in California who has worked with wealthy parents told Business Insider that encouraging her to instead be herself was the right approach.
“They have chores, they have responsibilities,” Chan added. “We also take them to work. Mark and I take both of them to the office to see what we do, how we contribute.”
That same year, he told Fox News that he generally doesn’t want his kids parked in front of a television or computer “for a long period of time.” At the time, he said he let his daughters use video calls to talk with relatives across the country but is stricter about other forms of screen time.
Anne Wojcicki
In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Wojcicki said that while she had professional help cleaning the house a few times a week, she had told them to stop doing the laundry on Fridays so that her children could learn the chore.
“It’s so easy to be like, ‘I don’t have to do laundry again. I don’t have to cook again.’ But then you’re not normal,” she told the Times. “I have a new rule lately. I just don’t go out on weekdays. If I’m raising kids, I need to be focused on helping implement that normalcy.”
Wojcicki also talked at the time about cutting her children’s hair herself.
Satya Nadella
Nadella says his own parents “created an environment where they let me set my own pace and pursue what I wanted,” and that influenced his approach to raising his own children.
“It’s important to focus on what [our kids] need to thrive,” he previously told Good Housekeeping.
The Microsoft CEO and his wife, Anu, also “both think children should have dogs,” she told Good Housekeeping.
“There is a different sense of companionship and responsibility that comes with it — that emotional sense that there is a being waiting for you to come back,” Anu said.
Nadella told Good Housekeeping that he gets reports on what their kids do on their computers. The couple limits how many movies and what kinds of video games and websites their kids can view.
Sundar Pichai
“We use Google Lens for homework. I don’t want to get him in trouble, but the class allows you to do that,” Pichai previously told Bloomberg. “But sometimes he asks me for help on math. Sometimes I’m lazy and I pretend as if I’m thinking, but I’m also using Google Lens to kind of figure out the answer.”
Bill Gates
The philosophy focuses on exercising control when it comes to emotions, such as by minimizing some reactions as a parent, like shouting or reprimanding. Gates said his dad believed in the same philosophy, and that “he was never panicked.”
Gates, who for many years was the world’s richest man, has also said he tried to keep his kids from being spoiled.
In a 2025 episode of the podcast “Raj Shamani’s Figuring it Out,” Gates said he was giving his children less than 1% of his total wealth, “because I decided it wouldn’t be a favor to them.”
“I want to give them a chance to have their own earnings and success be significant,” Gates added.
Melinda French Gates
The billionaire philanthropist has said one of her guiding ideas as a parent was learning to be “good enough.”
French Gates, who has three children with Bill Gates, wrote about “the notion of the good enough parent” in an excerpt from her 2025 autobiography published by Time.
She said the idea became especially meaningful when her children were 9, 6, and 2, and Warren Buffett’s major donation to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation required her to spend more time away from home.
French Gates wrote that she felt guilty about the time she was missing with her children, but the idea helped her let go of the expectation that good parenting required perfection.
“And to any other parent who is reading this, know that this is every bit as true for you,” she wrote. “When it comes to taking care of your family — some of the most important work you’ll do in this world — I hope you’ll refuse to let perfectionism rob family life of precious joy.”
Jeff Bezos
The Amazon founder attributed this to his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who he said would “much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid.” Bezos added that this was “a fantastic attitude about life.”
Alexis Ohanian
“My favorite parenting tip that I inherited from him was his Sunday tradition of making breakfast for our family,” he said in 2020. “I love being able to make pancakes with my family when we’re all in the same place on a Sunday, and always do my best to put away outside distractions so we can be together.”
On a 2025 podcast episode, Ohanian said he “wholeheartedly” wanted his then-seven-year-old daughter to use AI every day. He said he’s used the technology to enhance her creativity: he had ChatGPT turn some of his childhood pencil sketches into “full-color illustrations.” His daughter, Ohanian said, still draws with old-fashioned markers and paper as well.
“My wife and I both want her to be bored,” he said. “I do look forward to playing video games with her when she’s older, but it’s really important that she gets time to just be with her thoughts and be with her blocks and be with her toys, so we’ll be regulating it pretty heavily.”
Evan Spiegel
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said in 2018 that he and his wife, supermodel Miranda Kerr, limited their then-seven-year-old’s screen time to 1.5 hours a week. The rule, he said, was partly influenced by not being allowed to watch television until he was almost a teenager.
He said that parents should lead by example and work to limit their own screen time as well.
Spiegel told People in 2025 that he’s glad his kids are growing up with digital tools, and Kerr said they don’t let their 14-year-old have phones or computers in his bedroom past 9:30 pm.
Peter Thiel
At the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2024, Thiel said his children — who were three and a half and five at the time — were allowed to use screens for only about an hour and a half each week.
But Thiel also said it was too simplistic to treat tech and social media companies as the source of all modern problems.
“It’s too easy to turn tech or the social media companies into the scapegoats of all of our problems,” he said.
Andy Jassy
Becoming a dad changed how Amazon CEO Andy Jassy would bring work home.
“I realized that I had to change the way I worked, or I was either going to have to leave Amazon or I was going to be a lousy dad,” he said in October 2026 during the company’s “Bring Your Parents to Work Day.”
Jassy highlighted three immovable parts of his weekly schedule: a Tuesday date night with his wife, a weekly breakfast with each of his two kids, and dinner with the full family every night. If he had more work to do, it would come after the kids went to bed.
“I just think some of those things, you just have to decide they’re a priority,” he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
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