In 2018, in the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk said he had deleted the Facebook pages for his companies Tesla and SpaceX because the platform “gives me the willies.” And later that year, he also deleted his Instagram account. Zuckerberg and Musk have often been at odds over the years. If Musk is a boon to Zuckerberg’s fortunes, he’s an unlikely one. “Last thing I would have EVER expected was to use any platform of Zuckerberg’s.”Īnd yet, by Friday, Zuckerberg said Threads had reached 70 million user signups - amassing a user base nearly a third of the size of Twitter’s in fewer than two days for a platform that could eventually help knock out one of Facebook’s chief rivals and give a boost to Meta’s struggling ad business. “Never used nor ,” another user said, adding that they had to join Instagram for the first time to gain access to Threads. “I boycotted Facebook years ago and when I heard about this I joined immediately.” “It boggles the mind,” one user posted to Threads. Some early Threads users even commented on the strange nature of the situation - that they would be eager to join a social network run by one billionaire whose company has faced intense public criticism simply because they were so eager to get away from another. “Musk has done one thing after another to piss off his own user base,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School. While Twitter users have lamented what Musk’s ownership has meant for the platform, it may be the best thing that could have happened for Zuckerberg. During that time, he has managed to anger many of the platform’s users and advertisers with his erratic statements, mass layoffs and significant changes to Twitter’s policies. The app’s overnight success was a direct result of the chaos under Musk’s leadership of Twitter since last October. What is Threads? Here's what you need to know about the potential 'Twitter Killer' Mark Zuckerberg's company, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, will officially launch Threads, Instagram's text-based conversation app, on July 6 to compete with Elon Musk's social network, Twitter. PARIS, FRANCE - JULY 05: In this photo illustration, the home page of the social media application Threads is displayed on the screen of an iPhone on Jin Paris, France. Meta’s Twitter clone launched this week to unprecedented success, despite Meta’s history of privacy violations and enabling election meddling, not to mention longstanding concerns that the company and Zuckerberg wield too much power over the social media market. After years of trying and failing to capture Twitter’s audience with copycat features, Zuckerberg is now capitalizing on Twitter’s struggles with a new app called Threads. This week, however, Zuckerberg notched his biggest win from Musk yet.
In the process, it seemed to make Twitter’s rivals look better managed and draw away critical attention that might otherwise have been focused on other tech giants, including Meta, as they went through painful layoffs and suffered declines on Wall Street.
The saga, which only continued after Musk completed the deal and pushed through numerous controversial changes, often dominated news cycles. Musk early last year criticized Twitter, then nearly joined its board, then agreed to buy the company before launching a monthslong and ultimately unsuccessful fight to get out of the deal. And the company’s core ad business was under significant pressure from privacy changes made by Apple.īut then, the attention of lawmakers, media and the tech world writ large abruptly shifted to another tech billionaire: Elon Musk. Zuckerberg’s plan to rebrand Facebook as Meta and pivot to the so-called metaverse was met with broad skepticism. Revelations from hundreds of internal company documents, known as the Facebook Papers, had drawn sharp criticism from lawmakers, users and civil society groups in late 2021 and forced company executives to appear before Congress.
At the start of last year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat.
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