Elon Musk proposes an unconventional new competition with Mark Zuckerberg
Elon Musk proposed a new competition with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday. But that could make big advertisers even more nervous about returning to Twitter. What does Musk have in mind? The 52-year-old billionaire has suggested that they measure their respective manhood. Seriously.
“I propose a literal d*ck measuring contest,”[ads1]; Musk tweeted further Sunday eveningcomplete with an emoji of a ruler.
Musk sent the tweet as a follow-up to something he had tweeted about 9 hours earlier, proclaiming “Zuck is a cuck.”
The proposal comes just two weeks after Musk and Zuckerberg vowed to physically fight each other in a literal cage match. It’s still unclear if the match will actually happen, but Musk has tweeted photos of himself with trainers. Zuckerberg trained in jiu jitsu even before this billionaire fight was proposed.
Musk spent much of Sunday tweeting, with particular focus on Zuckerberg, whose company Meta recently launched a rival to Twitter called Threads. Zuckerberg’s platform has already attracted over 70 million users, a number built largely on the fact that Threads makes it easy for anyone with an Instagram account to join the new service.
There is speculation that Zuckerberg even moved up the planned launch of Threads early to take advantage of what has been seen as chaos on Twitter. While pitching internet celebrities on Threads, Meta reportedly billed the new social media platform as a “sandy” alternative to Twitter, according to a report from the Verge.
What chaos, really? Everything from Musk declaring that the perfectly harmless word “cisgender” is now gibberish to an announcement that Tweetdeck will soon become a subscriber-only feature.
To top it all off, Musk also announced last weekend that most users would be limited to reading just 600 tweets per day, which The Atlantic humorously compared to setting a 12-item limit for all customers at Costco. And while prices have been raised considerably since then, and perhaps even removed altogether, the move allowed competitors to take advantage of the situation. In fact, Twitter competitor Bluesky, which was recently started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, saw such an influx of new users last weekend that it had trouble keeping up and had to temporarily halt new signups. Bluesky, it should be noted, is still in beta testing and not open to a wider audience.
But none of those rival efforts have pleased Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion late last year. Musk handed over the CEO role in early June to NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino, who has been seen as just the kind of person who can make brands feel safe on Twitter again. But it seems like Musk is doing everything in his power to make it clear that Twitter is free for everyone, and he likes it that way. It’s hard to think of any other explanation why a man like Musk, with so much money invested in making Twitter an attractive place for advertisers, would propose the kind of competition he is with Zuckerberg.
Where does Twitter go from here? Your guess is as good as mine, but Musk isn’t making Yaccarino’s job any easier. And if advertisers were nervous before — since some refused to be seen with Musk at a marketing conference in April — they’re even more nervous now.
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