The two biggest social media moguls who own Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) have been feuding for the last couple of years. The latest in their virtual jabs happened when Mark Zuckerberg challenged Elon Musk to a cage match on his new social media platform, Threads. The two have been in a dog show fight for quite a while now, but it seems Musk isn’t ready to take the fight offline. But how did this fight start?
SpaceX Launch Test Failure
Zuckerberg and Musk were on good terms before. They were both giants in their chosen field, with Musk leading in the E-vehicles industry, and Zuckerberg owning the biggest social media platform.
In a gesture of goodwill, the two billionaires agreed a collaboration in 2016. SpaceX, the space technology baby of Musk, is supposed to take Zuckerberg’s satellite up to space. However, SpaceX encountered some failure and the ship exploded on the test launch. The $200 million satellite went up in flames. Naturally, Zuckerberg was upset. He wrote his disappointment on Facebook, “SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite.”
Since then, the two tech giants have been passive-aggressive with each other, issuing virtual taunt after another. Zuckerberg spoke out about Musk’s negative view of Artificial Intelligence. The latter is famous for his belief that AI will put an end to human civilization. But the former said that Musk had a doomsday view of the technology.
Last month, Mark Zuckerberg released the newest part of Meta, a social media platform called Threads. The launch sparked controversy because of how similar it was to Elon Musk’s Twitter, now called X. Musk bought the hit networking site Twitter last year. He was very outspoken about what he wanted to do with the platform. But his plans didn’t sit well with a lot of people, including Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg Challenged Elon Musk After Virtual Back-and-Forth
So in true Zuckerberg fashion, he started Threads. It was eerily similar to X, except there are no pesky ads after every post. According to Zuckerberg, he will not be monetizing the platform with ads until it reaches a billion users. Users of Facebook and Instagram are now switching to Threads since it’s easy to connect all these social networks with just one login.
Of course, Elon Musk caught wind of this and he was outraged. He tweeted about it, calling Zuckerberg names like lizard, and other unmentionables. The Facebook mogul wasn’t going to take the insults sitting down, so Mark Zuckerberg challenged Elon Musk to a cage match. Musk said the fight will be live-streamed on X.
Zuckerberg has since responded on Threads, saying, “I think we can all agree Elon isn’t serious and it’s time to move on. I offered a real date. Dana White offered to make this a legit competition for charity. Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead. If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me.”
Mark Zuckerberg challenged Elon Musk to a cage fight, but in legal terms, Musk sued for a cease-and-desist on Threads, alleging that the latter hired former Twitter employees for the platform, hence the similarities.