Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg traded insults over the weekend as the rivalry between the billionaires intensified mostly in Zuckerberg's favor. On its fifth day of existence, the new app Threads of Meta has hit over 100 million user registrations, making it one of the fastest growing applications in history.
Meanwhile, Twitter's traffic is falling according to Mathew Prince, its CEO companyof network services Cloudflare, whose data shows that visits to Twitter have been steadily declining since Musk took over, a trend that has accelerated slightly in recent weeks. In response, Musk invited Zuckerberg to a genital measuring contest.
Threads, launched as a competitor and direct copy of Musk's troubled company, has outgrown even the Chat GPT. It is currently the most downloaded app for iPhone and Android, according to the analytics company SensorTower.
"100 million people signed up for Threads in five days," Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri told Threads Monday. "It 's crazy. I can't make sense of it."
In recent weeks, Musk's reactions to the Threads news have ranged from swearing he's not worried about any of it to lashing out at Meta's alleged social media monopoly. On Sunday, Musk tweeted: “Zuck is a cuck". (Cuck, an insult of choice for conservatives, is short for cuckold, a word for a man who allows his wife to sleep with other people.) Eight hours later, Musk proposed "a genital measuring contest."
I propose a literal dick measuring contest 📏
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 10, 2023
But Zuckerberg doesn't seem particularly bothered. Threads has a serious stake in its early success. The app is built on network Instagram, which means signing up takes seconds. Users automatically build a network as friends and followers are constantly signed up from Instagram.
That alone isn't enough for long-term viability, but it won't take too much to destabilize an already faltering Twitter. In fact, Threads could fail but be a serious win for Meta if it brings one of the few major competing social networks to its knees.
