Elon Musk Is Making Mark Zuckerberg Seem Cool Again
Elon Musk has done the once unimaginable: He has helped revive Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley mojo. That was evident this week as tens of millions of people signed up for Zuckerberg’s alternative to Musk’s Twitter. After more than eight months of turmoil under Musk on Twitter, a certain glee erupted from those who said they were tired of the chaos and sometimes nastiness of his particular digital clubhouse.
So much so that they signed up for Threads, overlooking the typical privacy anxieties that come with Meta Platforms sites. Those concerns had, in part, made Zuckerberg akin to a public enemy for years. Users of his social-media platforms wrestled with the reality that their pictures, posts and likes were fuel in a larger data industrial complex that had made him one of the world’s richest men and raised worries over privacy in the digital age.
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg seized the moment, rolling out Threads amid a Musk-led policy change at Twitter that limited the number of posts users could read each day, an initiative announced unexpectedly last weekend as part of his stated effort to reduce third-party companies scraping user data from the site. “If you think about it, Elon is the greatest PR person of all time. He has us rooting for Meta!?!" Ashley Mayer, a co-founder of venture capitalist firm Coalition Operators, tweeted on Friday.
The stakes in the fight between Musk and Zuckerberg may have more to do with influence than dollars. Twitter’s user base is a fraction of Zuckerberg’s platforms’, and its annual revenue at its peak was less than 5% of Meta’s sales. But the bird app has long punched above its weight in terms of sway as a home for journalists, politicians and celebrities shaping popular culture and
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