Elon Musk has stepped up his war of words with Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg – calling him a ‘cuck’ after threatening to sue over his new Threads app.
Replying to screenshots of Zuckerberg, 39, laughing at burger chain Wendy’s telling him to go into space to ‘really make Musk mad’ the Tesla CEO simply replied: ‘Zuck is a cuck’.
Musk, 52, and fellow tech billionaires Zuckerberg have seen tensions rise after they agreed to take each other on in a cage fight.
In what became a viral back-and-forth, Musk tweeted on June 20 bragging that he was ‘up for a cage match if he is’, to which the Meta boss responded on Instagram ‘send me the location’.
Zuckerberg broke his decade-long Twitter silence by tweeting a Spider-Man meme to make the launch of Threads.
The Twitter-lookalike app, Threads, calls retweets ‘reposts’ and tweets ‘threads.’ It allows users to post up to 500 characters of text and up to five minutes of video.
Musk has also threatened to file a lawsuit over the platform, accusing it of poaching former employees to create a ‘copycat’ app.
Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro wrote in a letter released Thursday: ‘Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms (Meta’) has engaged in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property.
‘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.’
He also claimed Meta assigned those staffers to create ‘copycat ‘Threads’ with the intent to use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to further the development of Twitter’s competitor.
The decision to create the rival comes after Musk purchased Twitter for $44billion in October last year.
Musk has since spearheaded a series of controversial moves – including cutting staff and limiting the number of messages people can see a day.
That has caused the value of Twitter to plummet, with Fidelity recently estimating Twitter is worth just one-third of what Musk paid.
He hit out at Meta’s new platform and claimed it spreads ‘false happiness’ like Instagram – which is also owned by Meta.
Musk responded to news of the potential lawsuit by stating on Twitter that ‘Competition is fine, cheating is not.’
Zuckerberg has yet to respond to the threat of a lawsuit.
Threads has been nicknamed ‘Twitter Killer’ online amid animosity between the rival billionaires who agreed recently to take each other on in a cage fight – with the Colosseum in Rome a potential venue as well as Las Vegas.
Chef Gordon Ramsay, pop star Shakira and Mark Hoyle, better known as the YouTuber LadBaby, have already joined Threads and made their presence on the app known.
Zuckerberg said this week: ‘I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.’
Twitter has been in a steep decline since the take over by the former world’s richest man – who was keen to take on the project after becoming disillusioned by the site’s perceived biases and content moderation policy.
Source: dailymail.co.uk
