It’s no secret there’s no love between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as just days after Musk said Zuckerberg has ‘too much social media power’ the Tesla owner purchased Twitter. So what does this mean for them? Here’s their feud explained.
Talking at a Ted conference in Vancouver, Musk compared Zuckerberg to King Louis XIV saying he had too much control over public debate due to his ownership of Meta – which is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media sites.
However, the 50-year-old SpaceX and Tesla owner has just now purchased the rival social media site Twitter for a cool $44 billion. Thereby ramping up the pair’s rivalry and feud.
How did the feud begin?
There’s no love lost between the two with Musk making these comments as the public feud between the pair goes back to 2016 when a SpaceX rocket explosion destroyed a Facebook satellite. From this Zuckerberg issued a heated statement saying he was ‘deeply disappointed’ about SpaceX’s failure.
The satellite was set to be part of Facebook’s Internet.org project – which aims to deliver internet connectivity to the developing world – and would have been the company’s first satellite in orbit. In a post the Facebook founder said he was ‘deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent.’
Musk, kind of, did apologise for it when he said: ‘Yeah, my fault for being an idiot. We did give them a free launch to make up for it, and I think they had some insurance.’ However, I hasten to add, this wasn’t until 2018 when he was replying to a reporter’s tweet.
But this clearly wasn’t enough to patch things up between them and in 2017 things heated up.
Disagreements over AI
During a Facebook live broadcast a viewer asked Zuckerberg about his thoughts on Musk’s anxieties around artificial intelligence (AI) – Musk had previously called out for more regulation when it came to new AI technology.
But Zuckerberg said: ‘I have pretty strong opinions on this. With AI especially, I’m really optimistic, and I think that people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios … I don’t understand it. It’s really negative, and in some ways, I actually think it’s pretty irresponsible.’
Which many took as a clear swipe as Musk who then clapped back at this saying: ‘I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited.’
In 2018 things became even more targeted and public when Facebook became completely entangled in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Musk publicly deleted his companies’ Facebook pages, tweeting Zuckerberg’s company gave him ‘the willies’.
Then in 2020 when the actor Sacha Baron Cohen tweeted about the need to regulate Facebook Musk made his feelings even more clear when he called for people to delete the app calling it ‘lame’.
US Riots To Present Day
Their feud got pretty nasty when Musk used Twitter to share memes linking the US Capitol riots to Facebook. Musk Tweeted: ‘This is called the domino effect,” along with an meme showing dominoes, with the first one labelled “a website to rate women on campus,” a reference to Facebook’s beginnings with Zuckerberg at Harvard University (watch The Social Network). The last domino was about the rioters.
In Zuckerberg’s defence he’s been pretty quiet on his front when it comes to publicly talking about Musk. But his dislike for the new Twitter owner has been evident.
Just last week Musk, before it was confirmed he would be purchasing Twitter, fanned the flames again as during a Ted talk, according to the Guardian, he said: ‘As for media sort of ownership, I mean, you’ve got Mark Zuckerberg owning Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, and with a share ownership structure that will have Mark Zuckerberg XIV still controlling those entities.
‘We won’t have that at Twitter.’