The ongoing war of words between tech titans Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has reached new heights following the launch of Meta’s Threads app on July 5, 2023. The friction between the two has significantly increased, adding more drama to an already-fiery series of jibes and taunts exchanged online.
The feud initially began when reports surfaced that Instagram, owned by Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms, employees were shown a picture of Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor, codenamed “Project 92,” which is now known as Threads, meaning that the Meta platform was developing a Twitter competitor. During an internal all-hands meeting, Meta Platforms’ chief product officer, Chris Cox, mentioned that creators desire a version of Twitter that is “sanely run,” referencing Musk’s handling of Twitter. This move didn’t sit well with Musk, who acquired Twitter in October 2022. Since then, Musk has been relentlessly taunting Zuckerberg with comments like “Zuck my 👅” and has since challenged Musk to a cage fight.
The tension between the two has now escalated further as Twitter issued a legal threat against Meta’s Threads app, alleging that it infringes on Twitter’s intellectual property rights. In a letter directed to Meta’s CEO, Twitter’s lawyer claimed that Meta had recruited former Twitter employees with access to trade secrets and confidential information. On the other hand, Meta denied these allegations, asserting that no former Twitter employees are involved in the Threads engineering team.
The launch of Threads seems to have affected Twitter’s web traffic as well, according to Similarweb, a data company specializing in web analytics. In the first two days after Threads became publicly available, Twitter’s web traffic saw a 5% decrease.
What led to the fight?
To understand the roots of this feud, we must go back to 2014 when Zuckerberg invited Musk, a business magnate and co-founder of Facebook, to his home. The purpose of the invitation was to convince Musk that he was overly concerned about the safety of artificial intelligence. Musk declined the invitation and has since expressed his concerns about the negative effects of Instagram, which he believes makes people depressed, and Facebook, which he stated gives him unease.
Tensions between Musk and Zuckerberg rose in 2016 after SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company, experienced a rocket explosion while working on delivering Internet access to parts of sub-Saharan Africa as requested by Facebook.
Musk’s straightforwardness and unwillingness to hold back further fueled the fire when he publicly criticized Zuckerberg’s “limited” understanding of artificial intelligence during a Facebook Live broadcast in 2017.
In 2018, Musk deleted the Facebook pages for both SpaceX and Tesla amidst the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal. August 2020 saw Musk overtake Zuckerberg in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index rankings, thanks to a Tesla, Inc. shares rally.
Moving closer to the present, in May 2023, Zuckerberg participated in and won his first Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament. He has reportedly achieved success in several jiu-jitsu competitions. During the same month, Zuckerberg claimed to have completed the Murph Challenge, a strenuous workout, in just 40 minutes.
In June 2023, when a Twitter user mentioned that Zuckerberg now practices jiu-jitsu in response to another user stating that the upcoming Instagram Twitter competitor would be called Threads, Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a cage match. In response, Zuckerberg shared a screenshot advising Musk to start training and said, “Send me location,” a reference to Khabib Nurmagomedov, a Russian mixed martial artist who challenged Conor McGregor using the same words. In a tongue-in-cheek manner, Musk mentioned that he would use his weight advantage and perform “The Walrus” by simply lying on top of Zuckerberg.
On-going Events
The feud took a more personal turn in July 2023, as Musk made a derogatory insult with sexual connotations against Zuckerberg in a recent post, calling him a “cuck” and even mentioning a “literal d*ck-measuring contest.”.
The fight between the two is expected to take place at the UFC Apex in Enterprise, Nevada. Musk suggested changing the venue to the Colosseum in Rome, Italy, but the Ministry of Culture denied extending an invitation.
While it is impossible for us to know the seriousness of this online feud, the online community is having a great time following up on the war of words. This rivalry has even inspired a free-browser game called Zuck vs Musk. Created by Jason Kapalka, the designer of popular games like Bejeweled and Plants vs. Zombies, the game is a modified version of WrestleBros. Players can control either Musk or Zuckerberg and engage in a cage match against each other.
As the online war and challenges continue to be exchanged online, it remains to be seen if the Musk-Zuckerberg feud will find a resolution or further escalate in the future.
