Twitter vs. Threads: The Musk-Zuck Cage Match That’s Actually Happening

Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition last fall ushered in a slew of alternative platforms, from Post. to Mastodon to Bluesky Social, a venture involving Twitter’s cofounder Jack Dorsey himself. None of these sites seem to have really caught on, until now (well, maybe). Meta’s Threads, which launched Wednesday and was reportedly pitched internally as essentially a saner Twitter, is already being called a possible “Twitter killer.” An offshoot of Instagram, Meta’s text-based app became the most rapidly downloaded app ever shortly after its launch, per The New York Times. As of Friday morning, they were up to 70 million sign-ups, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Needless to say, Twitter is not happy; shortly after seeing its first legitimate challenger, Musk’s company fired off a legal warning. “Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro wrote in a Wednesday letter to Zuckerberg, first reported by Semafor. “Twitter reserves all rights, including, but not limited to, the right to seek both civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure, or use of its intellectual property by Meta.” Accusing Meta of “systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property,” Spiro went on to allege that Meta had hired ex-Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.” Meta has soundly denied the allegations. “No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee—that’s just not a thing,” Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, told Semafor.

Meanwhile, tensions between Musk and Zuckerberg are only growing (and yes, this is where we get to the part about these two tech executives threatening to physically fight each other). Musk has publicly accused Meta of playing dirty. “Competition is fine, cheating is not,” he tweeted Thursday. The Twitter owner has previously attacked Zuckerberg’s business record, privately disparaging the fact that his rival got rich off software that Musk apparently finds unremarkable, according to The Wall Street Journal. More recently, Musk blamed Instagram—Meta’s hottest product in the US—for causing mental health problems. News of Meta’s Threads last month was the final straw: Musk responded by challenging Zuckerberg to a literal cage match, and Zuckerberg, a Brazilian jiujitsu student, agreed. (At this point, it seems unlikely that a match will happen. Even Musk’s mother stepped in to stop her son from fighting. Moreover, Musk tweeted Monday that he needs “a lot more training.”)

As for Threads, the microblogging platform, to pose a real and sustained threat to Twitter’s ubiquity, Threads must attract the same politicians, celebrities, and media figures and sustain activity on the site. So far, it has managed to do just that. More than a quarter of all House and Senate members joined the platform within its first two days of existence, per an Axios report. While Democrats are far more inclined to join a Twitter rival, given Musk’s right-wing makeover at Twitter, notable Republicans have also ventured onto Threads, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, House majority leader Steve Scalise, former vice president Mike Pence, as well as several other GOP presidential candidates (no, not Donald Trump). Likewise, a few top aides at Joe Biden’s White House have joined Threads.

This mixture of Republicans and Democrats could make Threads the first Twitter challenger that can reasonably be viewed as nonpartisan, a key component of Twitter’s pre-Musk success, while rivals, including Post. and Mastodon for people on the left and Truth Social and Gettr for people on the right, were adopted or marketed along partisan lines.