Musk, Zuckerberg and the bitter battle for the future of social media

Just days after agreeing to a cage fight with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg was asked, “in the name of camaraderie”, to say something positive about his tech rival. After six seconds of silence, the best the Facebook founder could come up with was how Musk had “streamlined” Twitter by laying off more than 80 per cent of the company’s staff since taking it over last year.

Speaking on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Zuckerberg went on to list all the reasons he thought Twitter was a failure. “For whatever reason, I feel like Twitter has not lived up to what I would have thought its full potential should be,” he said. “I always thought that Twitter should have a billion people using it… The idea coupled with good execution should get there.”

His comments followed years of barbs between the billionaires, seemingly stemming from the moment Musk accidentally exploded Zuckerberg’s internet satellite. The pair now look set to go head to head in both a literal and figurative fight, with the launch of Meta’s Twitter rival Threads on Thursday preceding a potential MMA bout between the tech billionaires.

Zuckerberg now plans to hit that illusive billion-user figure – Twitter is currently on around a third of that number – and is already well on his way, with more than 30 million people signing up to Threads on just the first day of its launch, using Instagram’s vast userbase to achieve the unprecedented growth.

Meta’s Threads is not the first to attempt to take over what Musk claims is the world’s “digital town square”. Mounting frustrations surrounding Twitter’s direction have already seen a number of alternatives emerge as potential successors, though none have reached the critical mass needed to properly challenge it as the leading text-based social media platform.

“We’ve already seen an array of lesser-known apps such as Mastodon come to light in hopes of taking the crown; however, while there were temporary spikes in follower growth, nothing stuck,” Kyle Wong, a social media marketing veteran and chief strategy officer at Emplifi, told The Independent.

“In contrast, Meta has billions of active users to market the new app to, making it easier for them to drive adoption in comparison to another platform that would need to acquire new users.”

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Despite its vast user base – Instagram has 2.3 billion users compared to Twitter’s 330 million – Meta has consistently failed at launching its own spin-off apps. IGTV, Paper, Rooms and Slingshot were all unable to repeat the success of the company’s main apps, while an app actually called Threads was released in 2019 before subsequently being scrapped.

Zuckerberg has proclaimed 2023 Meta’s “year of efficiency”, with part of this goal involving thousands of employees being laid off – a tactic borrowed from Musk.

“It can be argued that the last thing Meta needs during its ‘year of efficiency’ is to try and launch yet another app and risk spreading itself too thin – again,” said Mike Proulx, a research director at the analytics firm Forrester. “But this one hits differently because, this time, Meta is banking on a moment in time amid peak Twitter frustration.”

The arrival of Threads, according to Proulx, may serve to simply “fracture the Twitter alternative-seeking user base”.

Yet within the first day of its launch, Threads had five times the number of users of all of its closest Twitter rivals combined, including Donald Trump’s Truth Social and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s decentralised effort Bluesky.

The timing of Threads could not be better for Zuckerberg. Last weekend, technical issues forced Musk to introduce limits for the number of tweets users could load, prompting a flurry of interest in competitors that do not charge users to see or be seen.

“Threads looks set to be a Twitter killer, and comes at the worst possible time for Elon Musk’s doomed social network,” said Drew Benvie, CEO of social media consultancy firm Battenhall. “With Twitter becoming more unreliable, costly and unsafe than ever, I expect users will vote with their fingers … Because of that, I wouldn’t be surprised if Threads becomes larger than Twitter.”

Meta did not mention Twitter by name in the announcement of Threads, however, Zuckerberg was quick to acknowledge the clear similarities between the two apps. Posting to Twitter for the first time since 2012, the Meta boss shared a popular meme from the Spider-Man comics that shows two identical superheroes pointing at each other.

The joke was at least proof that Zuckerberg is willing to use Musk’s app – something that is not reciprocated by the world’s richest man. After ordering his companies SpaceX and Tesla to delete their company Facebook accounts in 2018, he explained his decision by saying the social network gives him “the willies”.

He followed this up by deleting his personal Instagram account in 2018, writing in an email to his brother that it was “weak sauce”. Shortly after the launch of Threads on Thursday, he elaborated further in a tweet: “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.”

He also aired his grievances against Zuckerberg’s move to create a “Twitter clone” with several follow-up tweets in the hours after its launch. “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” he posted, quoting a tweet detailing how he planned to sue Meta over “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation” of Twitter’s trade secrets and IP.

Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Zuckerberg in an effort to shut Threads down. The Independent has reached out to Spiro for comment.

No date has yet been set for the cage fight between Musk and Zuckerberg, but the battle over the future of social media has already begun.