We don’t know who is behind the absurd story of a fight in the Colosseum between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg “Like the true gladiators” who have been feared in recent days, what is certain is that in the business sphere, a real duel is being waged between them through presentations, declarations and court cases.
Let’s take a step back.
Following the hemorrhage of users and advertisers that Elon Musk has endured since his recent decision to transfer most of Twitter’s services only to paid users (from the blue check mark to the ability to endlessly view tweets per day), Zuckerberg found fertile ground for launch in 100 countries Threads, a microblogging app connected to Instagram for text conversations (maximum 500 characters), as well as photos and five-minute videos. Themes will also support shares, such as retweets, as well as posts with quotes. Users can also limit their replies, block and report other users. Finally, posts in threads can be easily shared as Instagram stories.
The app launched on Thursday, July 6, and was very well received by users, with it installed on two million devices just two hours after the official launch. Two hours later, another three million were added to the account. new subscribers in Topics. By Wednesday evening, their number had already doubled: ten million downloads. By Thursday morning, their number had tripled to thirty million users. According to forecasts, the publication reports The newspaper “New York Timeswithin two months, the app will surpass one hundred million users, a feat achieved so far only by ChatGPT.
There’s also no shortage of enthusiasm from the US celebrity community (currently no European launch expected in the short term) with the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Shakira, Oprah Winfrey, Will Smith and others doing it. I don’t particularly sympathize with Elon Musk.
In reality, Thread is adopting Twitter’s algorithm and usability, making it more widely available, and for this reason, Elon Musk did not take it well: in fact, he threatened Meta with legal action, accusing it of creating Threads thanks to proprietary information. classified as a company secret and revealed by former Twitter employees who now work at Meta. The answer came from Andy Stone, Meta’s press officer, via Threads: “No former Twitter engineers worked on the app,” he wrote.
Even among users, not everyone is enthusiastic about Threads: for many, it’s just another Twitter clone app – like Mastodon and BlueSky – others got angry when they discovered that for now, if they ever wanted to delete their Threads profile, they’d have to give up their Instagram profile too.
Twitter remains ahead, at least for now, with its 237 million users and seventeen-year history.
In short, the conflict is open. So who knows if a duel between the two billionaires will happen again. Maybe not in the Colosseum, but in Las Vegas!