Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t tweet. So he was notable when he posted one on Wednesday night, his first in 11 years, shortly after the launch of Threads, his new Twitter rival.
His choice of meme, two Spider-Man pointing at each other, offered a lot to interpret. It could be seen as a nod towards the debut of what is essentially a clone of Twitter. You could see him winking at the talk about a cage match between he and elon musk — while also acknowledging how Musk’s work at Twitter has influenced his own thinking about running a tech company.
There’s also a broader, simpler way to look at the meme: two tech titans with many similarities now meeting in the technological equivalent of melee.
“We believe this ongoing feud between Zuckerberg and Musk is becoming nastier with the launch of Meta Threads,” Dan Ives, a managing director and senior equity research analyst covering the technology sector at Wedbush Securities, a company, said in a statement. financial services and wealth management company. email. “Zuckerberg sees blood in the water for Twitter and is now looking to gain market share with the launch of Threads.”
It is a situation that has been brewing for about five years. Zuckerberg and Musk were once in very different businesses (social media vs. cars and rockets) and they also occupied very different places in public discourse.
Questions about Facebook’s privacy practices and recommendation systems changed Zuckerberg’s image from a Harvard business whiz kid to growing concern about the unbridled growth of social media and what some call surveillance capitalism.
Musk, meanwhile, kept drawing. Comparisons of Tony Stark as Iron Man. Tesla was blazing a trail to a greener future, and SpaceX was reinvigorating dreams of getting humans to Mars or even beyond. Oh, and he called Facebook.”bored.”
That dynamic would begin to change as their rivalry became more direct, with Musk’s acquisition of Twitter proving to be a major turning point.
The increased scrutiny of Musk’s business practices, combined with his acceptance of conservative politicians and politics, soured Musk among some of his supporters, helping him amass a right-wing fanbase that continues to grow.
Musk and others on the right, meanwhile, have sought to paint Zuckerberg as a quiet leftist who changed the election of Joe Biden with hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. The Federal Election Commission unanimously dismissed an election administration grant complaint by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, which found “no reason to believe” wrongdoing.
More recently, Musk has openly embraced many of the modern and sometimes fringe causes. far right online. Zuckerberg has remained relatively apolitical.
“Zuck and Musk have become proxies for a lot of civic, political and social issues,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, an associate professor of communication at Cornell University who studies social media. “And I feel like the conversations that I’ve seen, it’s kind of been that Zuckerberg and Meta are the lesser of the two evils.”
And while an actual cage fight may not ensue, what could have been more of a personal rivalry turned undeniably professional once Musk bought Twitter.
Twitter seems to agree. A lawyer for Musk sent a cease-and-desist letter to Zuckerberg dated Wednesday alleging that Meta “has engaged in the systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” and that the company hired former Twitter employees to build Threads. . A Facebook spokesperson denied that any Facebook engineers working on Threads have previously worked at Twitter.
Business tends to breed rivalries, and technology has been no different. The well-documented relationship between Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was featured a series of ups and downs. Gates and Jobs did business together before becoming fierce critics of each other, though they also occasionally interjected a compliment or two.
by Zuckerberg Recent Comments on Lex Fridman’s Podcast they were the closest Zuckerberg or Musk have come to expressing anything close to admiration, mostly around making Twitter “leaner.” Both Twitter and Facebook have had multiple rounds of layoffs.
Zuckerberg might be more apt to offer kind words to Musk considering the dynamic between them. Musk’s deal to buy Twitter and his subsequent management have raised questions about the future of the platform.
But the stakes in the business for both of them don’t seem to be that high.
William Cohan, journalist and former investment banker, recently wrote for the media outlet Puck that there is a way for Musk to lose control of Twitter entirely if the people who hold the company’s debt put the company into involuntary bankruptcy proceedings.
But Cohan noted in a phone interview that even with Twitter’s struggles, Musk’s net worth has grew considerably in 2023. Tesla shares, which account for much of Musk’s wealth, are up to 150% this year.
Meta has had its own ups and downs, and while Threads is a success, it’s still a small part of its broad range of businesses. Its shares are up 134% this year, and the company is worth about $748 billion.
So what are the bets? Maybe it’s more about the legacy. While Zuckerberg’s public image hasn’t changed significantly in recent years, Musk’s has. And so, without Zuckerberg doing much, some people suddenly they find themselves supporting him.
“Here’s the ultimate irony: Elon Musk has turned Mark Zuckerberg into a quasi-sympathetic figure,” Cohan said.
Cage or not, the fight is on.
