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If the recent online feud between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is to be believed, the two entrepreneurs will soon face off in a “cage match” in Las Vegas or Rome. Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White said he’s trying to stage this real-life clash of the tech giants, claiming they’re both “very serious” about the event, which Musk first described as a joke. “This will be the largest battle in the history of the world,” White said.
A billionaire brawl would indeed represent the greatest showmanship yet from the heads of the world’s most powerful social media platform. But this week, the couple embarked on an even more important fight — one that could dramatically reshape the landscape Industry $231 billion.
Since he bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, Musk has devastated its workforce, rolled back its moderation and made reckless changes that enraged users and advertisers, sending it teetering on the brink of bankruptcy earlier this year.
In an opportunistic act, Zuckerberg this week launched Thread, a Twitter clone aimed at ousting Musk’s app and drawing in its disaffected users. Zuckerberg said he aims to build a “friendly .
The rollout has been a huge success, with about 70 million users by Friday. The hiding Musk threatened to sue Meta for allegedly poaching workers fired from Twitter and using their “secret” knowledge of the platform to build leads. “Competition is good, cheating is not,” he wrote.
But it’s too early to crown Zuckerberg the victor on social media. The threads still lack vital functionality and a plan to attract the journalists, academics, and news outlets that drive so many Twitter conversations. The couple may also fight over video and AI. “In the WWE wrestling saga, I view this scene as an equal match, both on an ego level and on a technical level,” says Greg Kidd, an early Twitter investor.
The rivalry between Zuckerberg, 39, and Musk, 52, goes back many years, according to their associates. “They always hated each other,” says a prominent tech investor who knows both, adding that Zuckerberg was “furious” when, in 2016, a SpaceX rocket carried a satellite linked to a Facebook initiative. burst. In 2018, when #deleteFacebook started popping up during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk joked “What is Facebook?”.
In general, Zuckerberg has been in a lot of debt to Musk lately. The latter’s perceived mishandling of Twitter, along with constant feuds with high-profile figures, has deflected attention from the scrutiny drumbeat of Meta: as a factory of fake news, a plunderer of privacy and a destroyer of democracy.
And it was Musk’s brutal downsizing of Twitter that paved the way for Zuckerberg to announce his layoffs earlier this year with little response, as he tries to revive Facebook’s popularity. “Zuckerberg faces a huge strategic problem — and Topics represents his best opportunity to minimize the damage,” says Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who has become an outspoken critic.
Meanwhile, the media’s fixation with Musk (which he often encourages) has created space for Zuckerberg to succumb to his own invention as an athletic bro with a penchant for mixed martial arts. “Zuckerberg has this desire to be the most important person on earth . . . it’s always about scale,” says one person familiar with his thinking.
In Silicon Valley, respect is given to those who innovate. But where Zuckerberg’s biggest bets — on cryptocurrencies and metaverses — failed to gain much traction, his other modus operandi has been to shamelessly mimic competitors’ features, drawing enemies and antitrust scrutiny in the process.
In 2004, the Winklevoss twins sued Zuckerberg, claiming that he stole their business idea and the source code for what would later become Facebook itself. Since then, cloning Snap’s disappearing short video feature, in the form of Instagram Stories, has become a pivot of the platform, while Reels, Instagram’s TikTok equivalent, has been slowly gaining ground.
But Zuckerberg, an admirer of Augustus Caesar and the Roman emperors, came up with one original stroke of genius in his latest effort. By connecting threads to Instagram, users have been able to create a network and feed of engaging content that comes with it. This makes the app stable instantly. When you start monetizing, “Meta is well-positioned to take all the ads that have left Twitter,” says an executive at an advertising agency. Twitter needs to do something big, fast.
The duo will have more to fight, including creator talent. Both want to integrate more payments and shopping on their platforms. Both men are now scrambling to become dominant performers in the field of artificial intelligence. Musk is working on a new startup to rival OpenAI, which could use Twitter data to power its models. Zuckerberg, who has deeper pockets, is increasing Meta’s investment in AI internally.
However, there are those who remain skeptical about the pair’s prospects, pointing instead to platforms like ByteDance’s TikTok as true innovators. Another early Twitter investor says: “It’s a battle for the world championship that is worthless – who dies faster, Twitter or Facebook? Neither will be a major part of the future, but it’s fun to watch egos battle it out.”
hannah.murphy@ft.com
