By launching Threads, the Meta executive hopes to seduce those disappointed with Twitter. But the project is also part of a personal and long-standing competition with Elon Musk in Silicon Valley

Will Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg compete in a ring, in an MMA duel in Las Vegas, or in the Roman Colosseum? Since the head of Twitter said that he was “up for a cage fight” with the founder of Facebook, fans of this hybrid martial art, halfway between Greco-Roman wrestling and boxing, have been preparing for the “match of the century.” Googuenard, Mark Zuckerberg did not say no. Since then, advisers to the billionaires have been negotiating preparations behind the scenes, according to the “New York Times

Although the fight may never finally happen, in the meantime, Mark Zuckerberg has already opened hostilities with Threads (see above). The launch is strategic: it is the first app created from scratch by Meta since that of Facebook in 2004, Instagram and WhatsApp having been bought by Facebook in 2012 and 2014 respectively

The Valley, a battleground

Threads is an excellent example of the very personal rivalry between the first and tenth world fortunes. Silicon Valley, the cradle of the Internet, has always been a land of clashes between tech billionaires. In the 1980s, the most famous enemies were none other than Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. When the latter developed Windows, the co-founder of Apple saw it as a stab in the back, he who had hoped to work with Microsoft for the software part of the nascent Macintoshs

But today, the global race for artificial intelligence is reactivating rivalries in the Valley. In search, for example, Microsoft intends to use AI to give Bing (its search engine) a new lease of life compared to Google. In an interview with The Verge in early February, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, even compared Google to “an 800-pound gorilla”, implying that his rival was too heavy to grasp the

Two billionaires who are completely opposed

As far as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are concerned, everything is the opposite. From age (52 versus 39 years) to communication style (uncontrollable for one, hypercontrolled for the other). Not to mention the borders of their empires. If Musk has a multifaceted kingdom, ranging from cars with Tesla to space with SpaceX, Zuckerberg's is limited to social networks. The founder of Facebook has had trouble diversifying his group, as evidenced by the failure of Libra, the cryptocurrency project, or his Quest headsets, which have found limited

Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg would have long been jealous of Elon Musk's “jack-of-all-trades” side, according to the American press. In return, the South African would have long been envious of the speed at which Zuckerberg grew rich thanks to a simple social network, which spent billions to send rockets into space. In this context, the takeover of Twitter has renewed hostilities: at the same time that Mark Zuckerberg was shrinking his empire, laying off a quarter of Meta's workforce in a single semester, Elon Musk was expanding his empire by taking over the most influential social network on the planet. It's no coincidence that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't tweeted...

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