Rivalry Between Elon Musk And Mark Zuckerberg Escalates In War Of Words After Thread Invention

Twitter CEO Elon Musk, and Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have continued their war of words, taking jabs at each other online after Musk threatened legal action over Meta’s new Threads platform.

The rivalry between the tech titans intensified following Meta’s release of Threads last week, prompting days of online bickering between the Twitter owner and Meta CEO, Fox News reports.

The attacks escalated on Sunday when the official account for Wendy’s suggested on the Threads app that Zuckerberg should travel to space to “really” make Musk “mad,” in an apparent reference to Musk’s private space travel company, SpaceX.

“Hey @zuck, you should go to space just to really make him mad lol,” the Wendy’s account posted.

Zuckerberg responded with a laughing emoji.

The exchange was screenshotted and later shared on Twitter by a user who accused Zuckerberg of protecting “brand speech” while Musk “protects free speech.”

The tweet caught Musk’s attention, prompting a four-word response from the tech billionaire.
“Zuck is a cuck,” Musk wrote.Cuck is short for Cuckold, which is defined as “the husband of an adulteress.”

Meta’s new Threads app, dubbed by some as the “Twitter Killer,” aims to take over parts of Twitter’s microblog market and is seen as a direct challenge to Twitter, which was acquired by Musk in October 2022 for $44B.

Musk has accused Zuckerberg of creating a “copycat” app and threatened to file a lawsuit over the new platform. The online feud escalated after Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a cage match. Zuckerberg posted an image of Musk’s invitation on Instagram and responded, “Send Me Location.”

Since its release, Musk has dismissed the Threads app as nothing more than “Instagram minus pics” and accused Meta of engaging in “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” in a cease and desist letter sent by Twitter’s attorney Alex Spiro to Meta.

“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted at another point.

Zuckerberg hasn’t publicly responded to threats of a lawsuit, but has been taking jabs of his own at Musk on Threads by responding to posts with the word “concerning” along with a laughing emoji – seemingly mocking the one-word response frequently used by Musk on Twitter.

Zuckerberg also tweeted for the first time in a decade on the day the Threads app was rolled out, posting only a Spider-Man meme of the character pointing at an identical Spider-Man in what many considered a direct hit at his Twitter rival.