While the rivalry between centibillionaire media moguls Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, has recently intensified, the pair have been sniping at each other for years.
Highlighting just a few examples, in 2016, an unmanned SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida during a test, also destroying a satellite that Facebook had planned to use, leading to Zuckerberg expressing his disappointment in a Facebook post. A year later, Zuckerberg shared his optimism about AI via a live video. Musk, unimpressed, said in a tweet: “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.” Then, in 2018, Musk joined a campaign that urged users to delete Facebook over privacy concerns. Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla left the site.
Their bickering escalated last month when Zuckerberg launched Threads on July 5, a new social media app linked to Meta’s Instagram to rival Twitter. It only took five days for Threads to hit 100 million users, according to online data service Quiver Quantitative, dethroning ChatGPT’s record as the fastest-growing consumer app in history. It took ChatGPT two months to reach 100 million users.
See you in court
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