Competition and business go hand in hand. But sometimes two companies become embroiled in business feuds that divide customers as much as brands themselves. From Adidas and Puma to the billionaire space race, here are some of the most epic global business battles. Click through to read about their rivalries.

The cola wars have lasted more than a century, with Coca-Cola first introduced in 1886 and Pepsi following not long after in 1898. The most infamous era of rivalry came in the 1970s and 1980s, when Pepsi rapidly gained ground through its successful Pepsi Challenge ad campaign, featuring blind taste tests.

The Pepsi Challenge also pushed Coca-Cola into what looked like a PR horror show – the launch of its hugely controversial New Coke in 1985. But the backlash that followed, and swift re-launch of Coca-Cola Classic, attracted huge publicity and ended up cementing Coke’s number one spot in the cola market, where it remains today.

In 1950s Italy, Enzo Ferrari was in charge of his famous sports car company while Ferruccio Lamborghini was running a tractor business. Things may have stayed that way if Lamborghini, originally from a family of grape farmers but a keen mechanic, had not been unhappy with his new Ferrari’s engine and clutch.

Lamborghini thought he knew how the sports car could be improved, and took his concerns to Enzo Ferrari himself. But Ferrari replied – so the story goes – that there was nothing wrong with the car, and told him to stick to tractors. The outraged Lamborghini decided to get his own back, building his own car factory and unveiling the first Lamborghini sports car, the 350 GTV, in the early 1960s. The rest is history.

There is no love lost between these two fast food giants, which have spent vast sums trying to outdo each other in their advertising for decades. Burger King caught the public’s imagination with its "Silly Whopper. That’s a Big Mac Box" billboards in the 2000s, showing its larger burger struggling to fit in its rival’s box.

Burger King has even used Ronald McDonald in some TV adverts, featuring him sneaking into one of its branches. But McDonald’s has not been scared to hit back, featuring a road sign with an impossibly long list of directions to the nearest Burger King in a 2016 advert. The message? “McDonald’s is closer to you.”

Two brothers were at the centre of one of the most famous rivalries in sport – between shoemakers Adidas and Puma. It all started peacefully as the young Adi Dassler and his older brother Rudolf launched a footwear business together in Germany in the 1920s, working out of their mother's laundry room.

But the pair fell out as the business boomed and pressures grew during the Second World War. They split in two, with Adi launching Adidas and Rudolf launching Puma on different sides of the river in their hometown Herzogenaurach. A charity football match between their employees in 2009 was their first joint activity since the 1940s.

The battle between these tech titans has been raging for decades. Steve Jobs took regular aim at Microsoft in his time at the helm of Apple, accusing them of having no taste in the 1990s and putting the boot in with his company’s famous "Get a Mac" campaign in the 2000s.

Bill Gates and Microsoft sometimes hit back, with the founder calling Jobs "fundamentally odd" and claiming his rival knew little about technology. But the two occasionally managed to get along just fine, with the Microsoft founder even appearing in Mac adverts in the 1980s. 
More recently he revealed he had spent time with Steve Jobs at home before the Apple entrepreneur’s death in 2011.

As well as Gates, discover the world's other richest people in every decade

Business rows are not limited to branded products and boardrooms, with the superstars of the entertainment industry also prone to the odd feud. One of the most spectacular started when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2009, saying Beyoncé deserved the prize.

West refused to say sorry at first, before publicly apologising one year on. But a few years later he said he did not regret the interruption. The producer and rapper even used a waxwork of her naked in his bed in a controversial music video in 2016. But Swift was able to retaliate in her 2016 Grammys acceptance speech, which urged young women to ignore people who "try to undercut your success". It's uncertain whether the feud has been put to bed, but Swift did announce her surprise album Folklore on 23 July 2020 – just a day before West’s Donda album was due to be released, which fuelled rumours that the 31-year-old was looking to overshadow the rapper. 

Irritation with a popular product was also what spurred British entrepreneur Sir James Dyson to take on Hoover with his own vacuum cleaner. Frustration with the suction on the Hoover Junior and having to change its bags encouraged him to design a bagless alternative, which became a bestseller after going on sale in Britain in 1993.

Hoover tried to regain the initiative with its own bagless Vortex model. But Dyson won a high court case banning Hoover from selling it in 2000, after a judge ruled it had copied its founder’s design. Dyson’s biggest feud these days is with German rival Bosch-Siemens, as the pair have fought a legal battle in a row over energy labels.

Interested in how Dyson made such a success? Read James Dyson: the billionaire who cleaned up by reinventing the vacuum cleaner

Many music fans could not believe their luck when Napster was born in 1999, giving them access to a huge library of free music. But major US record labels were furious at Napster founder Sean Parker (pictured) and coder Shawn Fanning, who had found a way to let users easily share MP3 files.

Napster was booming, but suffered a body blow when the Recording Industry Association of America sued for breach of copyright. A judge ordered the new kid on the block to start charging or shut down. The company never recovered, ceasing operations in 2002. But it now lives on, with Rhapsody buying it up and rebranding itself as Napster in a surprising move in 2016.

The rivalry between Samsung and Apple is barely a decade old, but that hasn't stopped it becoming "one of the bloodiest corporate wars in history", as Vanity Fair put it. Things blew up when Samsung launched its first smartphone in 2009. It sparked fury at Apple, with the company accusing its South Korean rival of copying the iPhone.

The two firms battled it out in the courts and in ad campaigns, and the two phones are still going head to head 12 years later as they compete for global dominance. As of the the end of the third quarter of 2020, Samsung was coming out on top, commanding 22% of the smartphone market with 80.4 million shipments, while Apple trailed in fourth place behind Huawei and Xiaomi with 11% of the market, representing 41.7 million iPhone shipments.

Feuds between the makers of games consoles have rumbled on for as long as there have been consoles. Anyone with a long memory may remember the rivalry between Coleco, Mattel and Atari in the 1970s, which saw one firm disparage another in adverts similar to Apple’s "Get A Mac" campaign years later.

One of the biggest feuds in more recent times has been between Microsoft and Sony in the contest between the Xbox and the PlayStation. Fans are often fiercely loyal to one or the other, but Sony looks like it is winning the war as the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 4, and the original PlayStation make up the top three best-selling gaming consoles of all time, according to digitaltrends.com, with 365 million sales between them. The Xbox 360 comes in at sixth with just 85 million sales. That has not stopped the odd love-in between its leaders, such as when they wished each other luck with their latest launches in 2013.

As well as PlayStation, these iconic products have come back from the dead

Video sharing app TikTok has blazed into the social media sphere, and became the most downloaded app of 2020 with an impressive 115 million downloads in March alone, according to Appfigures data. Instagram has long been considered the younger, trendier relative of parent company Facebook, but Bytedance-owned TikTok’s overwhelming growth rate looks to be threatening its crown as the home of Gen Z audiences…

In August Instagram introduced its new Reels feature, allowing users to create and edit 15-second videos with backing music. The move was seen as a direct response to TikTok’s arrival on the scene and its surging popularity with short videos. Only time will tell whether Facebook’s 10-year old protégé or Bytedance’s new kid on the block comes out on top.

The clash of the aircraft giants started in the 1980s, when the European manufacturer Airbus started to eat into US firm Boeing’s market. Both sides and their governments have accused the other of receiving unfair state subsidies, taking their case to the World Trade Organisation.

The bitter dispute became one of the longest and most costly in the trade body’s history. The feud has spilled over into advertising, with Airbus giving its rival’s plane a Pinocchio-style nose in an image released in 2012. The two sides are still in competition, but both companies’ biggest concern right now is tackling the chaos wreaked by the coronavirus pandemic. Boeing has certainly steamed ahead when it comes to job cuts, announcing that 30,000 jobs would be axed following heavy losses in the run up to October. Meanwhile Airbus suggested in the same month that no further cuts would be made to its staff, after the plane-maker made 15,000 workers redundant in the summer.

Netflix founder Reed Hastings says his big idea came about from his frustration at having to pay a fee to Blockbuster after losing a video he had rented. Some think the story is too neat a dig at a rival to be true, but Hastings did start a subscription service offering DVD rentals by mail in the 1990s, and the streaming site was born the following decade.

Forbes reports that Hastings was "laughed out of the room" when he reportedly proposed to Blockbuster that his small company should run its brand online. But Hastings certainly had the last laugh, as Netflix soared in popularity while Blockbuster struggled and eventually closed down in 2010. There is only one store remaining in Bend, Oregon, which now attracts visitors from around the world as a living history museum.

Proving its worth even more, discover How Netflix conquered the world and its future plans

When 20th Century Fox’s first Star Wars film proved an instant classic in 1977, Universal Studios struck back with its own sci-fi TV series, Battlestar Galactica. The move infuriated Fox, who promptly sued. It accused its rivals of borrowing so much it added up to copyright infringement.

If you think that's bad, check out 25 of the craziest copyright claims

It highlighted no fewer than 34 similarities, from a galactic war between democratic and authoritarian forces to the non-human musical entertainers, from the democratic side’s captured heroine and wise, older hero to character names like Skyler and Skywalker. Universal Studios ended up scrapping the series not long afterwards, while Star Wars has become one of the highest grossing film franchises of all time.

Tensions have bubbled over many times between these two giants. Sometimes they have riled each other with their extremely similar characters, like Marvel Studios' 1964 superhero Wonder Man to DC Entertainment’s Wonder Woman. One eye-catching stand-off involved the Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War films, with both companies planning the same release date in 2016.

But unlike the characters in their movies, the two studios don't seem to be archnemeses. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige (pictured left) even called social media spats between fans "ridiculous" in 2017, and praised DC characters like Superman. But don’t expect fans to end their rivalries any time soon.

In 2008 the Snuggie launched and garnered a lot of attention. Its infomercial was mocked by the likes of Jay Leno and Ellen DeGeneres, but the attention only helped to sell over four million of the sleeved blankets from its October 2008 launch to the end of January 2009. CNN even reported that it had been imitated by rival Slanket, but Slanket actually predated the Snuggie by over two years.

But the rivalry is more complicated than that, as sleeved blanket companies Slanket and Snuggie were actually both imitators following in the steps of the Freedom Blanket, which hit the market eight months before the Slanket and three and a half years before Snuggies. Getting comfortable in the market isn't as easy as it is on your sofa.

British Airways' monopoly as national airline was suddenly challenged when Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic first came into being in 1984. What followed was a series of disputes throughout the 1990s, which began with each company suing the other for libel in 1993. The cases revealed that BA had engaged in a "dirty tricks" campaign and Virgin triumphed. BA was ordered to apologise and pay Virgin £610,000 ($953k) in damages. This was followed by a £4 million ($6.3m) fine that BA had to pay in 1999 after Virgin reported the carrier for offering incentives to travel agents; BA was found to be in breach of EU competition rules and therefore fined.

Branson in turn launched his own tricks against the established carrier. In 1997 when BA announced to remove the union flag from the tailfins of its aircrafts, Virgin started using it on the winglets and as part of its mascot, the Scarlet Lady, on the nose of the planes. Virgin jets were also painted with the slogan "No Way BA/AA" to attack the proposed alliance between BA and American Airlines. The most recent rift between the two companies is the battle of the coronavirus pandemic bailouts – BA's recovery bid has been bolstered by a £2 billion ($2.8bn) injection by the British government, while investors and creditors financed a £1.2 billion ($1.7bn) bailout for Virgin. The decades-long feud continues...

Richard Branson: the billionaire in everything from records to rockets

Dubbed ‘The Billionaire Space Race’, Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and Space X, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, are rivals in their ambition to dominate the cosmos. Both founded in the early 2000s, SpaceX and Blue Origin are each striving to be the first private company to offer the general public journeys to space. There is a long history of conflict between the two companies, including a battle for the rights to lease the 39A rocket launch platform used for the Apollo 11 moon missions, which was eventually won by SpaceX in 2014, and the rivalry spilling out onto social media in 2015 in a spat about reusable rocket technology.

So far SpaceX has inched ahead.  In 2018, Blue Origin received a $500 million (£366m) contract with the US Air Force to develop its New Glenn rocket, but in August 2020, when the Air Force selected rivals United Launch Alliance and SpaceX as its launch providers for the next five years, this contract was terminated. In November SpaceX successfully sent four astronauts to the International Space Station, but Blue Origin hopes to launch its first astronauts into orbit this spring, following a 15th successful test flight of its New Shepard rocket. This feud isn’t set to die down anytime soon, and there’s even dispute as to which of the billionaires is the world’s richest person. Forbes currently has the Amazon founder in pole position, assigning him a wealth of $190.8 billion (£137bn), while the Bloomberg Billionaire Index ranks Musk as top dog with a fortune of $195 billion (£140bn).

Elon Musk isn’t the only billionaire coming toe-to-toe with the founder of Amazon. Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, controls Reliance Industries Ltd, which has become embroiled in a court battle with Amazon. Both companies have interests in the same retailer, Future Group, as a means of dominating the Indian consumer goods market, which is reportedly worth $1 trillion (£718bn). Amazon owns a 49% stake in Future Coupons, giving it indirect ownership of a stake in the company, while Reliance Industries bought $3.4 billion-worth (£2.4bn) of assets from the Group earlier this year. Amazon objected to the sale and it was put on hold, before a New Delhi high court overturned the decision. Amazon is now appealing again, and the case will go to the Supreme Court.

Neither Reliance or Amazon is likely to back down, as they are looking to secure – or block – the largest retail sector deal India has ever seen. India is a market with immense potential for growth, and the outcome of this dispute is likely to shape the development of the country’s e-commerce for years to come, as well as the companies themselves.

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