One Device to Rule Them All? How These Billionaires Plan to Replace the Smartphone

 

Three tech titans, three radical visions — as Zuckerberg straps it to your face, Musk wires it into your brain, and Altman makes it vanish into thin air, the battle to kill the smartphone is anything but ordinary.

It’s not just another tech cycle. It’s not just thinner bezels, better cameras, or faster chips. What we’re witnessing is a power move by three of the most influential minds in tech — Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman — to fundamentally kill the smartphone as we know it. Not improve it. Not evolve it. Kill it. And replace it with something radically different.

For the first time, these titans are aligned in a shared vision, though each is marching to his own beat. The smartphone — the shiny rectangle that's dominated our hands, pockets, and lives for over a decade — is being targeted for extinction. And what’s coming next isn’t one replacement. It’s an ecosystem war.

Let’s start with Zuckerberg. While Meta floundered with its early attempts at virtual worlds, his quiet play has been smart glasses. The latest Ray-Ban Meta glasses are already whispering the future: camera-equipped, voice-activated, AI-enhanced devices that don’t need a screen. Zuckerberg believes in a world where you don’t stare at your phone — you live in augmented layers over reality. He’s betting you’ll wear your interface, not hold it.

Then there’s Musk, never one to play small. While the others think in terms of glasses and agents, he’s skipping straight to the brain. Neuralink, his brain-computer interface startup, aims to make thought the ultimate user interface. In Musk’s future, the device isn’t in your pocket or on your face — it’s you. Think a thought, control your tech. No swipes. No screens. No waiting. Science fiction? Maybe. But Musk has built rockets, cars, and satellites. Betting against him is historically unwise.

Finally, Sam Altman, the quiet revolutionary behind OpenAI, is taking a less hardware-centric route. His vision? An invisible, always-on AI assistant. A personalized brain that knows your preferences, predicts your needs, and seamlessly operates across your life — from scheduling your meetings to ordering your coffee. Altman’s world doesn’t need “devices.” It needs intelligent presence. And with the rise of GPT-powered agents, that world is already knocking.

Together, these three aren’t just launching products — they’re proposing a new relationship between humans and technology. One where interfaces fade away, and intelligence takes the front seat. A world where you don’t pull out a phone to ask Google a question — you ask your assistant directly into the air. Or your glasses. Or your mind.

But this revolution comes with resistance. Most notably, Tim Cook and Apple, who are doubling down on the iPhone’s ecosystem — refining it, integrating Vision Pro, and wrapping it in Apple’s privacy-first philosophy. Cook isn’t buying the death-of-the-phone narrative. Not yet. And with over a billion active iPhones, he has reason to hold the line.

Still, history has a pattern: every dominant tech form has an expiration date. The smartphone replaced the PC as the center of our digital lives. Now, something else is lurking, ready to take its place.

Zuckerberg, Musk, and Altman each believe their device — or lack of one — is next.

So the question isn’t if the smartphone will die.

It’s what — or who — replaces it.