Mark Zuckerberg tweeted for the first time in 11 years the same day Meta launched its Twitter rival, Threads — and it playfully threw shade at Elon Musk.
On Wednesday night, Zuckerberg tweeted out a photo of an infamous meme where Spider-Man is pointing at another Spider-Man.
It was the 39-year-old Meta boss’s first tweet since January 2012, when he promoted one of his Facebook posts that has since been removed from the site.
Zuckerberg didn’t include any text, though the timing of the post makes it apparent that he and Musk are the two men in Spider-Man costumes pointing at each other.
On Wednesday, Meta launched Threads in more than 100 countries. The app is a highly-anticipated Twitter rival that will allow users to write text posts up to 500 characters long, plus photos and videos up to five minutes long.
Similar to Twitter, users will also be able to like, repost and reply to others, though the platform does not currently offer direct message capabilities.
Although Threads launched as a standalone app, users can log in with their Instagram credentials and follow the same accounts.
Threads’s ties to the already-popular social media site could make it appealing to Instagram’s more than 2 billion monthly active users to adopt.
Within seven hours of its roll out, Threads scored over 10 million users — including seven of Twitter’s most followed users.
Ellen DeGenerous, Bill Gates and Shakira — who boast 75.4 million, 62.9 million and 53.8 million Twitter followers, respectively — already made the jump to the new platform, according to Insider.
US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also left Twitter, where she has 13.3 million followers, to join the Threads bandwagon.
“May this platform have good vibes, strong community, excellent humor and less harrassment,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in her first Threads post.
Jennifer Lopez, Oprah Winfrey and Wiz Khalifa were among the other celebrities to take up the new app.
Unsurprisingly, Musk didn’t make a Threads account. And though he also didn’t respond directly to Zuckerberg’s tweet, he took a jab at Instagram hours after the meme was posted.
“It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram,” he tweeted.
The back-and-forth comes two weeks after 52-year-old Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a cage fight — in the wake of announcements that Meta planned to build a text-based social media platform that’s been referred to as the “Twitter killer.”
It’s unclear if and when Musk and Zuckerberg will officially spar it out, though the rivals seem ready for a throwdown as it would mark the culmination of a years-long rivalry between the two that has reportedly played out behind closed doors.
Musk — a martial arts rookie who trained in Kyokushin karate, taekwondo, judo and “Brazilian jiujitsu briefly” when he was a boy — was pictured last week sparring during an “impromptu” training session for his potential cage match.
Podcaster, AI researcher and Brazilian jiujitsu black belt Lex Fridman tweeted photos of Musk holding him in a headlock and flipping him onto his back.
I’m extremely impressed with his strength, power and skill, on the feet and on the ground,” Fridman wrote in the post. “It was epic.”
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has been sharing videos of him training in MMA gyms since September, and recently took home gold in his first amateur Brazilian jiujitsu tournament.
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