The Musk-Zuckerberg Showdown
Image Credit: The Washington Post
In one corner stands Mark Zuckerberg: 39 years of age, 5 feet 7 inches tall, and a pretty skilled jiu-jitsu expert, at least according to his social media posts. In the other corner stands Elon Musk: 13 years older, 6 inches taller, and considerably heavier, with a “great” move he calls “the Walrus” (“I just lie on top of my opponent & do nothing”). The internet has recently been blowing up with the passive-aggressive jabs of the two billionaires, but as they grow increasingly childish, the highly anticipated fight between the two is growing increasingly certain.
The acquaintance of Zuckerberg and Musk originates from a while back, with the two actually on partnering terms at first. In 2016, as an initiative to expand internet access to underserved, rural areas of the world, Facebook (now Meta) partnered with Eutelsat, a European satellite operator, to lease the broadband capacity of the AMOS-6 satellite. To facilitate this plan, Facebook collaborated with SpaceX, which was responsible for launching the Amos-6 satellite into orbit using its Falcon 9 rocket. This collaboration, however, quickly failed, as Zuckerberg’s $200 million satellite exploded in a pre-launch test accident on one of Musk’s SpaceX rockets. After the explosion, Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook that he was “deeply disappointed” that “SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite.” This was the start of the feud between Zuckerberg and Musk.
2018 was when the tension between the two billionaires. It was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting firm, had acquired and used personal data from Facebook users. Following this news, Musk shocked the world by deleting both Tesla’s and SpaceX’s Facebook pages and tweeted: “It’s not a political statement and I didn’t do this because someone dared me to do it. Just don’t like Facebook. Gives me the willies. Sorry.” Then, in 2022, Musk posted a similar tweet saying that “Facebook gives me the willies.” This was just a few weeks before Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, which would officially put Musk and Zuckerberg up against each other as competing social media CEOs.
Even politics got involved in the rivalry. After his acquisition of Twitter, Musk stated that he wants Twitter to be “an inclusive arena for free speech,” specifically talking about political neutrality, something he did not think was present in other social media platforms like Facebook. He claimed that Zuckerberg’s $400 million donation to the 2020 election was “fundamentally in support of Democrats.” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that the claim was false; meanwhile, Musk has been courting more folks from the right, including Tucker Carlson himself.
More recently, things got really heated when Meta introduced a Twitter competitor called Threads, a text-based social network like Twitter with integration with Instagram. This action by Zuckerberg essentially prompted the fight between him and Musk. After several attacks sent to and fro online, Musk tweeted, “I’m up for a cage fight if he is lol” on June 21st. Soon after, Zuckerberg uploaded a screenshot of Musk’s tweet on his Instagram story with the caption “Send Me Location.” The interaction between Zuckerberg and Musk went viral on the internet, and Musk even tweeted regarding “some chance” of the fight happening in the Roman Colosseum(!).
The hype set aside, the fight between the two CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk would have a tremendous impact on the economies of their businesses. For investors, a martial arts event between two billionaire CEOs of businesses boasting similar, attractive stock prices can be quite a quandary. Moreover, the fight can be the deciding factor for the prevailing social media platform that everybody would use, as both Zuckerberg and Musk own platforms of veritable size and influence. And as for now, both seem very serious about the impending fight, so, for us social media users, the best option seems to be to “connect with friends and the world around” and “see what's happening in the world right now.”