Twitter vs Threads: Musk gets personal, punches below the belt in battle with Zuckerberg

Twitter will give you more laughs than every other social media app combined, claimed the microblogging site’s owner Elon Musk, as his battle with Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg intensified, with the latter’s Twitter clone Threads boasting of nearly 100 million signups in just a few days since launch. As of December 2022, Twitter had over 368 million monthly active users worldwide, according to data gathering and research company Statista.

Musk also warned about the “negative stuff” on Twitter. “You will get more laughs from this app than everything else combined But I have to warn you … don’t be shocked … there’s some negative stuff too,” the Twitter owner tweeted.

Musk and Zuckerberg have been taking potshots at each other since Meta Platforms unveiled its Twitter rival Threads.

Earlier Musk had called the Meta CEO a ‘cuck’, replying to a screenshot of Zuckerberg reacting to messages about the Twitter chief. Cuck is a derogatory word used to describe a “weak” or “servile” man or one whose wife is unfaithful. He also challenged Zuckerberg in a childish, below-the-belt contest.

The official Threads account of the restaurant chain Wendy’s on Saturday posted “Hey @Zuck, you should go to space just to make him really mad lol,” to which Zuckerberg replied with a laughing emoji.

Musk is also planning to take the battle to court. Twitter has threatened to sue Meta Platforms over Threads, per a letter sent to Zuckerberg by Twitter’s lawyer, Alex Spiro.Spiro accused Meta of hiring former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”

“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Spiro wrote in the letter.

In response, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post, “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing.”

It bears recalling here that soon after Musk took over, Twitter laid off over 50% of its roughly 7,500 employees. Musk initiated another round of layoffs earlier this year, sacking 200 employees. As of May this year, Twitter’s full-time employee count stood at about 1,000.

In an earlier tweet, Musk claimed Threads is “just Instagram minus pics, which makes no sense, given that thirst pics are the main reason people use that app.”

Responding to a tweet on the news that Twitter may sue Meta, Musk said, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Threads is set to cross 100 million user sign-ups since it launched last week for iOS and Android users in 100 countries. Meta’s newest product crossed 2 million sign-ups two hours after launch, 10 million users in seven hours, and 30 million in just 12 hours.

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