Ascetic Mark Zuckerberg, 39, recently winner of an amateur competition of ju-jitsu, was invited to fight by the exuberant Elon Musk, 52, donut lover no known sporting activity. The promise of this duel at the top set the canvas ablaze. Musk even set the scene: the Octagon in Las Vegas, a mythical cage where the champions of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) – the choice has since fallen on the Colosseum in Rome. Nothing surprising coming from a joker arriving on the first day at Twitter equipped with a sink or ensuring during the last VivaTech show, in Paris, to owe his success only to crystal meth, a powerful synthetic drug.
The face-to-face will probably never take place. But as often with Musk, the joke is not trivial. The confrontation between the boss of Meta and the leader of Tesla and SpaceX is elsewhere: on the technological ground. According to information obtained by the American online media The Verge, the origin of Musk’s provocation is said to be linked to a post on Project 92, Twitter’s competing social network that Meta is said to be designing. “I always thought Twitter should have billions of users,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent podcast. Meaning: he doesn’t have them, so there’s room for two.
This challenger would be installed on Instagram, the group’s flagship app for young people who are gradually abandoning Facebook, the big brother considered outdated. The timing is well chosen: since the takeover of Twitter last fall by Elon Musk, many advertisers have distanced themselves. And some users observe with skepticism, even concern, the impact on the content of the new paid offer put in place by Musk. Meta is not the only one who wants to take advantage of the opportunity. Mastodon and especially Bluesky, the new baby of Jack Dorsey, the former founder of Twitter, also want to reinvent “microblogging”.
Super app
Mark Zuckerberg is the most offensive at the moment. The little genius from Harvard, whose stiff and impassive expression has been the subject of countless gags on the Internet, is now working to change his image. He virilizes his Instagram account. Spends several hours on the microphone of the controversial Joe Rogan, a libertarian MMA commentator and antivax. Criticism in the press of the advances of Apple, another competitor in the augmented reality sector. In short, “Zuck” gives blows after having received quite a few, from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to the disavowal of his metaverse, still in limbo.
Musk, who has a huge following, is the perfect punching bag. Each clash with him guarantees the light of the spotlights. And their playgrounds are getting dangerously close. Musk and Zuckerberg both hope to be at the heart of the generative artificial intelligence revolution. Ultimately, the two entrepreneurs are also eyeing the concept of “super-app”, of which WeChat in China is the most successful incarnation.
The idea: to combine within the same platform social tools – which they already have –, payment functions and, why not, other options such as e-commerce bricks. Twitter has also been merged into the X Corp group, X.com being the old payment company founded by Musk in the late 1990s. The ancestor of PayPal. The boss of Meta, meanwhile, is making progress on the payment features of his WhatsApp messaging. Brazil and India are currently serving as test countries for possible global deployment. The warm-up, before a first round which promises to be intense.