In what is probably the definition of a literal grudge match, Twitter proprietor Elon Musk and Fb founder Mark Zuckerberg have indicated their curiosity in combating one another. The feud emerged when Musk, 51, tweeted his enthusiasm for a Las Vegas-held, MMA-style cage match between himself and Zuckerberg, 39. The latter replied to Musk’s problem in a seemingly optimistic method, writing on the Fb-owned Instagram, “Ship me location.”
The web reacted appropriately to the information, provided that the seemingly infantile feud is between “two pc geeks price greater than $300 billion put collectively,” The Atlantic reported. Many individuals on-line additionally famous that the struggle would probably be one-sided given Zuckerberg’s data of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Whether or not the pair will really get within the ring stays to be seen.
Optics apart, the rivalry between the 2 really has so much to do with the tech battle between Twitter and Fb’s mum or dad firm, Meta. It isn’t a brand new battle, both — the struggle problem marks “the most recent jab in a virtually seven-year feud between the 2 CEOs,” Insider reported.
Why are they feuding?
The cage match problem was primarily prompted by “the competitors of two comparable companies, which ramped up after Musk entered the social media enviornment final 12 months,” Vox reported. Musk was reportedly angered by Zuckerberg’s announcement in 2023 that Meta was creating a direct Twitter competitor codenamed Undertaking 92. Meta executives informed Platformer that the platform can be “a standalone decentralized social community for sharing textual content updates.” Meta additionally appeared to take a jab at Musk’s haphazard working of Twitter, with one government saying the platform can be “sanely run,” per The Wall Avenue Journal.
Following the information of Undertaking 92, Musk started taking photographs at Zuckerberg on-line, the Journal famous. Zuckerberg has been firing again with quips of his personal, and a few specialists say this can be a method for him to try to save face. The Meta head has “actually ramped it up over the previous 12 months,” one insider informed The Washington Put up, noting that he’s now “courting the identical ‘tech bros’ who’ve been captivated by Musk — who’s instantly Zuckerberg’s competitors in additional methods than one.”
As Musk continues to make headlines together with his controversial views on social media, Zuckerberg “can be getting a sense that he’s not revered,” Bhaskar Chakravorti, dean of world enterprise at Tufts College’s Fletcher Faculty, informed the Put up. The cage match is “a method for him to point out that, ‘Look, he’s edgy. He is usually a tech bro identical to the following man,'” Chakravorti added.
The rivalry goes again even additional
Whereas the cage match places the pair within the highlight, the feud between Musk and Zuckerberg is just not a brand new one. The animosity between the 2 appears up to now again to 2016, when considered one of Musk’s SpaceX rockets exploded whereas carrying a contracted Fb satellite tv for pc. After the incident, Zuckerberg wrote that he was “deeply dissatisfied” within the explosion, notably calling Musk’s launch a “failure.”
Since then, Insider famous that the pair “have been griping about one another behind closed doorways for years,” although they’ve additionally expressed their anger publicly. Only a 12 months after the SpaceX explosion, the pair acquired into one other anger match, this time over using synthetic intelligence. Throughout a Fb stay session, the Journal famous, Zuckerberg mentioned of AI, “people who find themselves naysayers and…attempt to drum up these doomsday eventualities…I simply do not perceive it. It is actually damaging, and in some methods, I really assume it is fairly irresponsible.” Musk, who the Journal famous has beforehand warned of AI’s risks, tweeted that Zuckerberg’s “understanding of the topic is proscribed.”
The pair’s confrontation got here to a head following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, wherein a British agency collected knowledge from Fb customers to make use of within the 2016 presidential marketing campaign of Donald Trump. Following the revelations, Musk deleted SpaceX and Tesla’s Fb pages. He tweeted in 2022 that Fb “provides me the willies.”
Musk has additionally gotten confrontational with others on social media, and this is not the primary time he is requested somebody to struggle. In 2022, after the struggle in Ukraine broke out, Musk challenged Russian President Vladimir Putin to “single fight.” This struggle by no means occurred, and it appears unlikely that the Zuckerberg match will occur both, particularly since Musk’s mom tweeted that she “canceled the struggle.”