The rivalry between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has intensified in recent weeks, especially since the launch of Twitter’s rival app Threads. In particular, Musk and Zuckerberg were set to engage in a cage fight, which was later cancelled, according to Twitter CEO’s mother Maye Musk.
The launch of Meta’s latest social media offering, Threads, has only exacerbated the situation between the two companies. It didn’t help that the Meta team marketed its new app as ‘Twitter killer’ and that the Threads team included many former Twitter employees.
Soon after the launch of Threads, Elon Musk threatened to sue Mark Zuckerberg in a letter sent using his lawyer Alex Spiro. Musk has accused Meta of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.”Twitter claimed that Meta had recruited numerous former Twitter employees who had allegedly kept unauthorized devices and documents from their time at Twitter and these employees were assigned to work on the Threads app.
In a tweet that has since gone viral, with around 2.2 million views and 40,000 retweets, a parody account of Musk with the username @ElonMuskAOC shared a screenshot of a message it claimed to have sent to the Meta CEO.
The message contained an image in the style of a QR code with the F-word inscribed in the centre.
Although the message was shared by a parody account, it’s not far from what Musk would have sent to the Meta CEO. In response to a screenshot of a conversation between Zuckerberg and burger chain Wendys on the Threads app, Musk replied: “Zuck is a cuck. The burger chain had asked the Meta CEO to go into space to make Musk really angry, and Zuckerberg had responded with a laughing emoji.
Meanwhile, reports indicate that after initial success the hype surrounding Meta’s latest social media platform could be dying out. According to various data reports Threads had approximately 49 million daily active users (DAU) when it first launched in early July. However, by the end of the second week, this number dropped by half to 23 million DAU.
