Mark Zuckerberg Ramped Up His Elon Feud By Appearing To Tweet For The First Time In Over A Decade After Launching His ‘Twitter Killer’ Threads

The beef between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk isn’t just about the cage fight that may or may not happen. (And may not go well for Musk if it does.) It’s about the fact that the former is trying to snuff out the latter’s social media service. On Wednesday, the Meta honcho launched Threads, his long-threatened “Twitter killer” (as some techies have dubbed it). He even did it a day early. But to really rub it in, Zuckerberg did something else: He tweeted for the first time in over a decade.

Zuckerberg’s post was simple, perhaps even inevitable: It was a meme, specifically the one of two Spider-Men pointing at each other. The joke was obvious: He was joking about how he’d created a Twitter clone, one that’s supposed to if not kill Twitter then at least provide the services Twitter, under Musk, no longer does.

“I think there should be a public conversations app with 1 billion+ people on it,” Zuckerberg posted on Threads shortly after it went life. “Twitter has had the opportunity to do this but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”

Threads appeared soon after Twitter went through some stuff over the weekend, including limiting the number of tweets users — even paid subscribers — could see and generally acting glitchy. It got so bad that its co-founder Jack Dorsey took sympathy.

Zuckerberg was never a big tweeter. It is, in fact, only the 13th tweet that still lives on his profile. (He could have always deleted a bunch.) He first tweeted in 2009 about being on a boat. He’s twice described things as “neat” — once TweetDeck, once an ambiguous “This.” In one, before the (original) blue checkmark days, he assured people it was really him. (His account has over 500,000 followers.) He didn’t tweet for three years, returning in 2012 to link to a since-deleted Facebook post about being “pro-internet.” That was his final tweet until now.

Zuckerberg’s Threads is an off-shoot of Instagram. It even allows users to subscribe to all their Instagram buds with one click. That also makes it easier to quickly amass a large user base who can set up an account in less than a minute. (By contrast, Bluesky Social, whose board includes Dorsey, is still not only in the Beta phase, but requires one to painstakingly rebuild their base, depending on who’s scored an early account.)

Threads is also touting itself as an “open, friendly” place, said Instagram head Adam Mosseri. That stands in contrast to Twitter, where blue checkmarks are now largely wielded by Musk heads willing to fork over monthly payments, not famous or notable people trying to prove they’re them.

There are already complaints about Threads — on Twitter as well as Threads, of course — but it is its first day. In fact, one of the jokes being bandied about is that there are now too many social media services.