The 50 greatest business rivalries of all time

by Fortune Editors
MARCH 21, 2013, 10:36 AM EDT
These stories of no-holds-barred competition, contempt, and all-out conflict shaped the
modern business world. Heres what you can learn from them.
There was the time Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant to demonstrate the danger of a
competitor's technology. The day that Nike NKE -0.41% , desperate for an advantage over a
surging Reebok, signed a college hoops player named Michael Jordan. And the time the
Central Pacific Railroad laid an astounding 10 miles of track in 24 hours to grab government
payments that the hated Union Pacific would otherwise claim.

Rivalries make great stories, and the greatest rivalries make the greatest tales -- reason
enough to read the following portraits of brilliance, skullduggery, nobility, mendacity, victory,
and failure. But if you're the driven type who demands more practical benefits, you'll find
those here too. After all, monumental business battles have changed the world. We cannot
imagine life without cellphones or the Internet, but if tiny MCI hadn't challenged the titanic
AT&T T -2.35% (the No. 4 rivalry in our ranking), the communications revolution would
have played out much differently. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (No. 6) ended up selling few
competing products yet contended for 35 years to impose radically different visions of
computing. And a global economy that couldn't function without air travel is far faster and
better because Airbus and Boeing BA -0.77% (No. 9) have had to fight each other every day
for 40 years.
But powerful rivalries can be blinding, obscuring events beyond the combatants' battlefield.
Coke KO -0.51% and Pepsi PEP -0.55% (No. 1) were so busy pounding the daylights out
of each other that they missed an entirely new notion, and today, inconceivably, the
bestselling energy drink in U.S. convenience stores isn't made by either company. (It's Red
Bull.) General Motors GM -1.10% and Ford F -1.58% obsessed over each other until one
day Toyota TM -1.79% had stolen the bulk of their profits.
What comes through most strongly in these stories is each conflict's sheer human intensity.
Only a brave novelist would have imagined the brother vs. brother saga of Adidas vs. Puma

(No. 20). Venice vs. Genoa (No. 7) may look like a dusty tale of feuding city-states, but it set
the tone for hundreds of years of European competition. The rivalry between the railroads
was economic, ethnic, and spectacular, involving sabotage, deception, and death. Who needs
such lessons? Oh, right, you do. So think of these dramas as guilt-free pleasures. Then, well
prepared for the task, go forth and pulverize your rivals. --Geoff Colvin

1. Coke vs. Pepsi

Why is the battle between Coke and Pepsi -- two ultimately similar types of sugar water -- the
most important struggle in the history of capitalism? Simply put, their rivalry transcends
time, distance, and culture. It has divided restaurants, presidents, and nations. It has been
waged in supermarkets, stadiums, and courtrooms. Its many foot soldiers include Santa
Claus, Cindy Crawford, Michael Jackson, Max Headroom, Bill Gates, and Bill Cosby. In
1886 an Atlanta chemist introduced Coca-Cola, a tasty "potion for mental and physical
disorders." Pepsi-Cola followed seven years later, though it would be decades (and two
bankruptcies) before Coke acknowledged the company in the way it had other competitive
threats: lawsuits. Pepsi-Cola had made hay during the Depression. Like Coke, the drink cost a
nickel, but it came in a 12-ounce bottle nearly twice the size of Coke's dainty, wasp-waisted
one. But by the 1950s, Pepsi was still a distant No. 2. It nabbed Alfred Steele, a former Coke
adman, who arrived embittered and ambitious. His motto: "Beat Coke." Coca-Cola refused to
call Pepsi by name -- the drink was "the Imitator," "the Enemy," or, generously, "the
Competition" -- but it began tinkering with its business (and imitating Pepsi) to stay ahead. In
1979, for the first time in the rivalry's history, Pepsi overtook Coke's sales in supermarkets. It
didn't last, and by 1996, Fortune declared that the cola wars had ended. Since then Pepsi, with
its increasing focus on health and snacks, has as good as surrendered. America's favorite two
soft drinks? Coke and Diet Coke. Winner: Coke --Erika Fry

2. Ford vs. GM

Ford, founded in 1903, and GM, which came along nine years later, have been warring for
101 years. The epitome of crosstown rivals -- their headquarters are just 11.5 miles apart -they face off every day on dealer lots and in motor sports. Both maintain operations to scour
the other's new products. In 2011, Ford marketing chief Jim Farley was quoted as having
said, "I hate them and what they stand for." Meanwhile, GM chairman and CEO Dan Akerson
recommended sprinkling holy water on ailing Ford luxury brand Lincoln. "It's over!" Winner:
Draw --Alex Taylor III

3. Thomas Edison vs. Nikola Tesla

Hell hath no fury like a mentor scorned. In 1884 world-renowned inventor Thomas Edison
welcomed a brilliant young Serbian engineer named Nikola Tesla into his New York office.
Tesla had been working on direct current (DC) electricity in Edison's Paris division for a few
years. Edison's DC apparatus reigned supreme at the time. But Tesla had conceived of a new
method using alternating current (AC), which, unlike DC, could transmit significant amounts
of power over long distances. According to Tesla, Edison dismissed his ideas as a waste of
time, not to mention dangerous given the high voltage involved. Tesla designed several
products for Edison, expecting to receive a promised $50,000 bonus for his efforts (about $1
million today). But when Tesla asked for his reward in the spring of 1885, Edison told him it
had been a joke all along. Tesla quit. He struck out on his own, securing patents and catching
the interest of Pittsburgh industrial titan George Westinghouse. Westinghouse had been

quietly developing power stations using AC. Learning of Tesla's technology, he acquired his
patents, putting the business might of the Westinghouse corporation behind the inventor. And
the war came. When he heard that Westinghouse was moving into the electricity business,
Edison ridiculed him. But it wasn't long before Edison was holding shocking public
demonstrations to discredit AC power. To make his point, he electrocuted dogs, cows, horses,
even an elephant. He then put his name behind an effort to use AC to power the first electric
chair. The execution -- which took place in Auburn, N.Y., in August 1890, lasted eight
minutes and required two attempts -- was a grisly affair. Westinghouse responded dryly,
"They could have done it better with an axe." Ultimately Tesla's AC technology won the war,
but the inventors' rivalry morphed into one of the greatest corporate battles in American
history. A mega-merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston in 1892 created
GE GE -1.28% , which went toe-to-toe with Westinghouse. Long after Edison and Tesla
died, their feud carried on until, in the 1980s, GE chose the right CEO (Jack Welch), while
Westinghouse chose four successive wrong ones. By the late 1990s, GE was the most
valuable company on earth. The original Westinghouse was no more; the current company
with that name is less than one-tenth GE's size. Winner: Nikola Tesla --Scott Olster
4. AT&T vs. MCI

MCI didn't seem like a giant killer at first. It was a startup that sold long-distance services via
microwave towers to truck drivers. But chairman William McGowan, a hard-living son of a
railroad engineer, led his company to do just that. Rather than duck Ma Bell's assaults
(predatory pricing), MCI took her head on, filing a case that would lead to the monopoly's
breakup -- and an antitrust playbook that others would use against Microsoft decades later. In
1980 a jury awarded MCI $1.8 billion. Two years later the government ruled Ma Bell a
monopoly no more. David had slain Goliath.Winner: MCI --Ryan Bradley
5. Nike vs. Reebok

Blame it on the shoes. The battle between Nike and Reebok lasted over three decades and
created celebrity athlete culture as we know it today. Initially the two couldn't have been

more different: Phil Knight, a former University of Oregon track star and a Stanford MBA,
tossed his accounting career and formed a company to import running shoes to the U.S. He
named it Nike after the Greek goddess of victory. Paul Fireman dropped out of Boston
University to take over his family's sporting-goods business. He acquired the North American
rights to British-made sneakers. Reebok, a line of white-leather women's aerobic shoes
named after an antelope, took off as jogging became a national craze. Fireman bought out the
parent company in 1984 and took Reebok public the following year. Nike, which had risen to
prominence by aggressively courting male customers and fostering a jock-laden management
culture, missed the market for women's sneakers. Reebok overtook Nike in 1987 as the latter
struggled to catch up. Eventually Nike regained momentum by signing the man who would
become the most iconic athlete of all time: Michael Jordan. Nike gained not just a hero
athlete but also a telegenic spokesperson who connected with audiences. On the back of
Jordan and the massive popularity of his Air Jordan brand, Nike surged ahead. (Air Jordan
sales eventually surpassed $1 billion annually.) Reebok responded by signing Shaquille
O'Neal, who once showed up to a meeting with Nike wearing a jacket emblazoned with a
huge Reebok logo -- much to the dismay of Nike executives. At the 1992 Olympics, Jordan
controversially draped a U.S. flag to hide the logo on the Reebok-sponsored tracksuits worn
by the U.S.'s winning Dream Team. The move delighted Knight, who baited Reebok further
by contributing $25,000 to figure skater Tonya Harding's defense fund after she was accused
of orchestrating a vicious attack on Nancy Kerrigan, a Reebok athlete. Nike continued to snap
up the most popular athletes, including Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras, and later Tiger Woods,
making Reebok seem lame by comparison. In 2005, Adidas bought Reebok, but the new,
combined company is still a distant second to the Nike juggernaut. Winner: Nike --Omar
Akhtar
6. Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs

Bill Gates and Steve jobs were as different as night and day, yet they had much in common.
This probably explains the bitterness of their rivalry. The fruits of their enmity? The creation
of the personal computer. First, the differences: Gates was an upper-middle-class kid who
went to Harvard. Jobs grew up in a family of modest means and didn't attend many classes at
Reed College. Deeply technical, Gates wrote the code for Microsoft's early products himself.
A born marketer with enough technical chops to be persuasive, Jobs relied on collaborator
Steve Wozniak to create the first Apple computer. Gates was the poster child for geeks
everywhere. Jobs, meanwhile, was suave from the start. Gates understood scale and leverage;
Jobs grasped style and message. (The more charismatic figure, Jobs, will have been played on
film by both Noah Wiley and Ashton Kutcher.) Gates and Jobs became the opposing poles of
the frantically growing computing revolution. Above all else, though, these rivals understood
business. Neither had formal training in the black arts of balance sheets and income
statements. Indeed, neither had graduated from college. Yet both were preternaturally shrewd
about making a buck -- and how to stick it to the competition. Gates dominated the first two
decades of their rivalry, overseeing Windows' rise as the world's default operating system.
Eventually Jobs welcomed a $150 million investment from Gates in 1997 when
Apple AAPL -2.21% was looking death in the face. (Attendees of the Macworld conference
where the deal was announced booed Gates' appearance by video.) But during the last 15
years of his life, Jobs flipped the switch on Gates, dominating beyond-the-PC segments like
music players, smartphones, and tablets -- all areas of heavy, and mostly fruitless, investment
by Microsof MSFT -1.33% t. (Irked by this, perhaps, Gates' wife, Melinda, banned their
children from having iPods and iPhones in the house.) The two were known to trade not-so-

subtle barbs. Jobs diagnosed Microsoft's essential problem as a lack of taste. Meanwhile,
Gates summed up one of Jobs' greatest achievements, the iPad, by saying simply, "It's okay."
Born seven months apart (Jobs was older), they were friendly in the years before Jobs died.
Having fought each other for so long, they knew better than anyone what the other had
accomplished. Winner: Steve Jobs --Adam Lashinsky
7. Venice vs. Genoa

The Italian Maritime republics invented many now familiar features of the business world. It
started with tax breaks. Venice and Genoa sat out the feudal era because they didn't have the
land needed to produce surpluses -- Venice is in a lagoon, and Genoa is hemmed in by
mountains. But they were in the sweet spot for trade. By lending their navies to rulers fending
off invaders, they won special privileges to trade without paying tariffs. Around the end of the
12th century, these conditions created an astonishing boom that fueled their feud. To raise the
money to assemble ships, crews, and cargo, traders came up with the idea of selling shares in
their operations. To spread the risk they invented marine insurance. The demand for ships
spurred the development, at the Venice Arsenale, of the largest factory complex in Europe
before the Industrial Revolution. Builders there mass-produced vessels using standardized
parts on an assembly line -- it was said that they could build a galley in a single day. (Dante
even gave it a cameo in his Inferno.) Eventually, to maintain clear records, there arose a
sublime invention: double-entry bookkeeping. Goethe may have been into the schnapps when
he (reputedly) said that "double-entry bookkeeping is one of the most beautiful discoveries of
the human spirit," but you can see what he was driving at. Without the concepts

of credito and debito and the balance sheet, modern capitalism wouldn't be possible. Winner:
Venice--Tim Smith
8. HP vs. IBM

Hewlett-Packards' victory over IBM has not been particularly sweet. In 2006 it surpassed
IBM in revenues, a lead it has maintained. But revenues are not the only measure of success.
Since the earliest days of IT, they have been polar opposites: HP seeded the engineeringheavy ethos of contemporary Silicon Valley. IBM's iconic Thomas Watson was more
salesman than scientist. HP HPQ -1.46% has had more CEOs in a decade than IBM IBM 0.51% has had since the end of the Watson family reign. IBM draws from five-year plans,
while HP is fond of aggressive moves. Winner: IBM --Jessi Hempel

9. Airbus vs. Boeing

It's about more than airplanes. The $160 billion aviation industry is pivotal to national
economies and thousands of jobs, not to mention civic pride. Boeing once dominated, but
Airbus, a subsidiary of Franco-German defense giant EADS, edged out a lead in 2003.
Political tensions have run hot since. Trade officials on both continents are fond of scathing
op-eds and public statements alleging malfeasance. Both sides have a point. A 2011 leak
revealed a personal letter from President George W. Bush to Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah
urging the purchase of Boeing jets. And Airbus has received billions in subsidies. As Boeing
deals with 787 Dreamliner delays, Airbus has taken to depicting its planes with a Pinocchio
nose. Ouch. Winner: Draw --Anne VanderMey
10. Union Pacific vs. Central Pacific

Abraham Lincoln kicked off the race in 1862. The Union Pacific Railroad started building
westward from Omaha while the Central Pacific Railroad built eastward from Sacramento.
They would meet in Utah, each receiving land and U.S. bonds per mile of track built. Bad
blood spilled all the way down to the workers, exacerbated by racial tension. Pacific used
Chinese immigrant labor; Union was staffed by Irishmen. Many died from the breakneck
pace required to beat the other. (TNT explosions didn't help things much.) In 1869 trains from
both companies touched noses, and then one passed the other to continue across the country.
The race ended, their feud dissolved. Winner: Draw --Shelley DuBois
11. McDonald's vs. Burger King

McDonald's Corporation MCD 0.00% . founder Ray Kroc summed up the intensity of the
fast food business best when he said of his competitors, "If they were drowning to death, I'd
put the hose in their mouth." In the quick-serve restaurant industry, no two brands have
waged war over customer loyalty as publicly as McDonald's and Burger King. The rivalry
dates back to the mid-20th century as both companies emerged on the national scene, battling
for territory and franchisees. The burger business is all about share of stomach. There are
only so many ways you can innovate when it comes to a hamburger, so copying competitors'
ideas is standard practice. Take the Big Mac, which was launched in 1968 as McDonald's
answer to the Whopper. Burger King introduced the Whopper in 1957 when, after realizing it
couldn't compete with McDonald's 15 cent hamburger, it decided the solution was to sell a
bigger burger for 37 cents. Burger King declared all-out war in 1982 by launching an
advertising campaign that claimed customers preferred the Whopper to McDonald's and
Wendy's. Both chains countered by suing for false and misleading advertising. In 1997, the
Home of the Whopper again took on the Golden Arches -- this time its fries with the tagline
"the taste that beats McDonald's." McDonald's struck back with its own advertising
campaign. The heated rivalry cooled as Burger King suffered a revolving door of CEOs and
owners, which helped McDonald's gain more ground. In 2011, for the first time ever, Wendy's
surpassed Burger King to become the No. 2 burger chain by sales. "In America, McDonald's
has won," says Andrew Smith, who teaches food history at the New School. But don't count
Burger King out just yet: In February the chain got into the latest fast food battle, Coffee

Wars, when it announced a line of coffee-based drinks like lattes through a partnership with
Starbucks' SBUX -2.06% Seattle's Best Coffee brand. Winner: McDonald's --Beth Kowitt
12. R.J. Reynolds vs. Philip Morris

13. Hertz vs. Avis

14. Procter & Gamble vs. Unilever

15. Netscape vs. Microsoft

16. Visa vs. MasterCard

17. Ferrari vs. Lamborghini

18. Macy's vs. Gimbels

19. Budweiser vs. Miller

20. Adidas vs. Puma

21. CVS vs. Walgreens

22. UPS vs. FedEx

23. Hearst vs. Pulitzer

24. Bayer vs. Tylenol

25. Duracell vs. Energizer

26. Wal-Mart vs. Target

27. NYSE vs. NASDAQ

28. Oreo vs. Hydrox

29. Hasbro vs. Mattel

30. Dunkin' Donuts vs. Starbucks

31. Oracle vs. Salesforce

32. Fender vs. Gibson

33. Canon vs. Nikon

34. U.S. Steel vs. Bethlehem Steel

35. Sears vs. J.C. Penney

36. Cornelius Vanderbilt vs. Jay Gould

37. J.P. Morgan vs. Goldman Sachs

38. Sotheby's vs. Christie's

39. Louis B. Mayer vs. Jack Warner

40. Blockbuster vs. Netflix

41. Pan Am vs. TWA

42. Comcast vs. Verizon

43. Greyhound vs. Trailways

44. Sony vs. Nintendo

45. Este Lauder vs. L'Oral

46. Google vs. Facebook

47. Michael Eisner vs. Jeffrey Katzenberg

48. Marvel Comics vs. DC Comics

49. BMW vs. Mercedes Benz

50. Netflix vs. Amazon