Zuck vs. Musk - A Billionaire Feud Shaping The Future Of Social Media

Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are arguably one of the most influential and polarizing figures of todays social media and tech world, and have recently been butting heads over a long standing feud between the two giants that hast been starting since 2016. While thru little jabs and subtle(and also not-so-subtle) remarks on each others various business plays, we’re here to give a brief documentation on the billionaire beef and what new plans from their historic rivalry will do to the landscape of technology and social medial.

In early 2016, the feud between the two respective businessmen started when a spectacular explosion of a SpaceX rocket destroyed a $200 million communications satellite that would have extended Facebook’s reach across Africa, dealing a serious setback to Elon Musk, the billionaire who runs the rocket company.

In response Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook after the explosion , “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.” A year later, Zuckerberg took a sharp response towards Musk, an open detractor of AI technology on a public Facebook livestream criticizing his fears as irresponsible and dubbing the audience agains AI as “naysayers” who “drum up doomsday scenarios”

Later in 2018 Musk was reported joining the #DeleteFacebook movement, a protest starting from the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, where in  the 2010s, the personal data of millions of Facebook users was collected without their consent by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, predominantly to be used for political advertising that ended being disclosed from a former employee of Cambridge Analytica. Musk then deleted official pages of Tesla and Space X on Facebook writing with,” it looked lame anyway”

Fast forward to recent times, it seems that the fief has finally spearheaded into a “cage match”  Dana White, the current UFC President, took the time to call Musk and Zuckerberg and claimed that both were “dead serious” about the fight. On Instagram, White placated concerns from UFC fans that Musk vs. Zuckerberg “wasn’t a gimmick fight.”

With the fight underway and constant subliminals thrown from both sides, Zuckerberg seemed to take the match from a sports route, and  make it a social media bout as well, as he launched Threads a new app from the parent company of Facebook instagram and WhatsApp, bearing a similar format to Twitter, with a text-based post feed with a blend of instagrams aesthetic format. With over 100 million sign ups already, Threads could pose as a formidable threat to Twitter, which has been currently owned by Musk since October of 2022, with these two Billionaires going back and forth from the ring to the net, it’s hard to imagine what more their legendary rivalry will do to shape our worlds scope of innovation and technology .