Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s beef reaches newfound heights as the latter launches his own rival to Twitter, Threads – with Elon’s reaction to the launch doing the impossible by making Zuck actually likeable.
Earlier this week, Meta Platforms – the social media conglomerate of which Mark Zuckerberg is the chairman, CEO and largest shareholder – launched Threads: an app that operates almost identically to Twitter that utilises one’s Instagram account.
It’s barely been alive a day or two and already Threads boasts millions of users. Naturally, many people are jumping on it just because it’s a fresh new thing, but there’s also a growing consensus that people who have become alienated by Elon Musk’s controversial decisions since taking over Twitter may ditch that platform for Threads, which seems more benign.
Unsurprisingly, Musk isn’t happy about Threads, with the tech mogul apparently considering legal action against Meta. According to Semafor, Twitter attorney Alex Spiro sent a letter to Zuckerberg on Wednesday accusing Meta of “systematic, wilful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” to create Threads.
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023
Tech insiders have already resoundingly criticised Musk for this move. “You fired all of your smartest engineers and now you’re jealous that Threads killed Twitter in a single day,” ex-Google engineer and comedian Geoff Plitt responded.
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Meta themselves have poured water on that theory: on Threads, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone also commented that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee – that’s just not a thing”.
Hilariously, this spat prompted Zuckerberg himself to log back into his long-dormant Twitter account and post a Spider-Man meme making fun of the situation – a surprisingly hilarious zinger from a man who’s long been criticised for being robotic. Nicely played, Zuck.
— Mark Zuckerberg (@finkd) July 6, 2023
Now it seems that Musk has retaliated after Threads started trending on Twitter, with mentions of the rival platform seemingly now banned. Now that’s some serious butthurt. Now we really wanna see the cage fight…
All memes aside, Threads offers some serious advantages over Twitter. Not only are character limits longer (500 versus Twitter’s 280) and video lengths longer (5 minutes versus 2 min 2 seconds), but Threads offers free verification through Instagram – something you now have to pay for on Twitter.
However, for many users, the main appeal of Threads will be that Musk’s not in charge… Zuck might be evil but he’s the lesser of two evils. Anyway, you should come follow DMARGE on Threads.