Mark Zuckerberg vs Elon Musk: A clash of technological egos

Get Free People in News Updates

we will send you one myFT Daily Digest Latest Email Rounding person in news News every morning.

If the recent online spat between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is to be believed, the two entrepreneurs will soon face off in a “cage match” in either Las Vegas or Rome. Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, has said he is looking to organize this real-life clash of tech giants, claiming the two are “deadly serious” about the event, which Musk previously Presented as a joke. White said, “It will be the greatest battle ever fought in the history of the world.”

A billionaire brawl would truly mark the biggest showdown ever from the heads of the world’s most powerful social media platforms. But this week, the pair launched a far more consequential battle – a battle that could dramatically reshape the landscape $231 billion industry,

Since buying Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, Musk has decimated its workforce, diluted its moderation and made impulsive changes that have upset users and advertisers, making it one of the top companies this year. Initially on the verge of bankruptcy.

In an act of opportunism, Zuckerberg this week launched Threads, a Twitter clone aimed at taking down Musk’s app and wooing its disaffected users. Zuckerberg said he aimed to make it “friendlier”. , , public conversation app that has over 1 billion people”, he added, adding: “Twitter has had an opportunity to do this, but it hasn’t taken advantage of it.”

The rollout was hugely successful, with nearly 70 million users as of Friday. A testy Musk threatened to sue Meta for allegedly poaching Twitter’s fired employees and using their “confidential” knowledge about the platform to create threads. He wrote, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”

But it’s too early to crown Zuckerberg the social media champ. Threads still lacks key functionality and plans to entice the journalists, academics and news outlets that drive many Twitter conversations. The pair can also fight over video and artificial intelligence. Greg Kidd, one of Twitter’s early investors, says, “In the (WWE) wrestling saga I consider this spectacle an equal match on both an ego level and a technical level.”

According to their aides, the rivalry between Zuckerberg, 39, and Musk, 52, goes back several years. “They’ve always hated each other,” says a top tech investor who knows the two, adding that Zuckerberg was “furious” when a SpaceX rocket carried a satellite associated with a Facebook initiative in 2016. . Blasted in attack, In 2018, when #deleteFacebook started trending during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk joked “What the hell is Facebook?”.

Overall, Zuckerberg has owed a lot to Musk lately. Twitter’s subsequent alleged misogyny, along with frequent feuds with high-profile figures, has distracted attention from its years-long investigation of Meta: a factory of fake news, a plunderer of privacy and a destroyer of democracy.

And it was only the result of Musk’s brutal downsizing of Twitter that paved the way for Zuckerberg to announce his deep layoffs earlier this year with little pressure, as he tries to revive Facebook’s popularity. Were staying “Zuckerberg faces a huge strategic problem – and Threads presents the best opportunity for him to undo the damage,” says Roger McNamee, an early Facebook investor who has become an outspoken critic.

Meanwhile, the media’s fascination with Musk (whom he often encourages) has made room for Zuckerberg to reinvent himself as a sports bro with an interest in mixed martial arts. “Zuckerberg aspires to be the most important person on Earth. , , It’s always about scale,” says a person familiar with his thinking.

Innovators are respected in Silicon Valley. But where Zuckerberg’s biggest bets – on crypto and the metaverse – have failed to garner much traction, his other modus operandi has been to shamelessly mimic the features of rivals, attracting enemies and antitrust-checking in the process.

In 2004, the Winklevoss twins sued Zuckerberg, claiming that he had stolen their business idea and the source code for what would later become Facebook. Since then, a clone of Snap’s disappearing short video feature, in the form of Instagram Stories, has become the centerpiece of the platform, while Reels, Instagram’s TikTok counterpart, is slowly catching up.

But Zuckerberg, a fan of Augustus Caesar and Roman emperors, brought an original stroke of genius to his latest endeavor. By connecting Threads to Instagram, users are able to generate a network and a feed of engaging content that comes with it. This makes the app instantly sticky. “When it starts monetizing, Meta is well positioned to take all the advertising coming out of Twitter,” says an advertising agency executive. “Twitter needs to do something big and fast.”

The pair will have a lot more to fight for, including the creator’s talent. Both are looking to integrate more payments and purchases on their platforms. And both men are now clamoring to become leading AI performers. Musk is working on a new start-up to compete with OpenAI, which can use Twitter data to power its models. Zuckerberg, with deep pockets, has been similarly increasing Meta’s investment in AI internally.

Still, there are those who are skeptical of the pair’s prospects, instead pointing to platforms like ByteDance’s TikTok as the real innovators. Another early Twitter investor says: “It’s a battle for the world championship of irrelevance – who is dying fastest, Twitter or Facebook? Neither of these are going to be a significant part of the future, but it is entertaining to watch Ego fight back.

hannah.murphy@ft.com