Elon Musk Takes on Mark Zuckerberg’s Empire
They are not friends and do not hide it. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have a feisty relationship. The former, who is the CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla (TSLA), went so far as to dub the latter “Zuck the Fourteenth” in an apparent nod to French King Louis the XIV, famous for his hubris and excess. He did so when he was pushing back, on April 2022, on a potential conflict of interest between him owning Twitter and being one of its most influential users, during a TED interview with Chris Anderson.
Basically, for Musk, Zuckerberg is an omnipresent emperor with dictatorial impulses. In addition to directly attacking Zuckerberg, the serial entrepreneur regularly goes after Instagram, one of the jewels of his rival’s social media empire. A few months later, Zuckerberg answered him indirectly by saying that “normal people” won’t want Musk’s brain chips, developed by Neuralink, a company Musk co-founded, in their heads.
The two men are also rivals. They fight to be the most powerful tech luminaries by controlling the most influential platforms. Meta Platforms, Zuckerberg’s social media empire, is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, three of the most popular platforms. Musk has been the owner of Twitter, considered the town square of our time, since the end of October. He is also the most influential personality on the microblogging site and uses his brand and name to attract other influencers and creators.
Zuckerberg and Musk are therefore also fighting for advertiser dollars. For a long time, the rivalry has remained very clean: Musk has often sought to establish a contrast between the two. He mainly questions the role of the two platforms and their impact on society.
