The rivalry between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has just heated up as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has teased that it’s launching a platform to rival Twitter.
The listing indicates that Threads will released on Thursday, July 6.
“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow,” the app description reads.
Meta did not respond to a request from The Epoch Times for more details about the rollout.
Musk–Zuckerberg Cage Fight?
Musk, who bought Twitter last October, reacted to news of the emergence of P92 by challenging Zuckerberg to a mixed martial arts (MMA) cage match.Zuckerberg, who’s been training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu since 2022 and has already won medals in a tournament, promptly accepted.
While no date has been set for the potential fight, UFC President Dana White has already started hyping the Musk versus Zuckerberg matchup.
“Talked with Mark and Elon last night, both guys are absolutely dead serious about this,” White said in a June 22 interview with TMZ. “They both said, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ They both want to do it.”
White said he expects Musk vs. Zuckerberg fight “would be the biggest fight ever in the history of the world.”
“It would break all pay-per-view records. These guys would raise hundreds of millions of dollars for charity. You don’t have to be a fighting fan to be interested in this fight. Everybody would want to see it,” the UFC president added.
Musk accepted an offer from decorated UFC veteran Georges St-Pierre to train him in MMA and the Twitter chief has already notched a session with the Canadian fighter.
“Had a great training session with Elon Musk, Georges St-Pierre, and John Danaher last night,” Lex Fridman, a podcaster and Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, said in a tweet. “Everything about this was epic!”
Musk replied: “Really fun! The obvious conclusion is that I need a *lot* more training.”
Twitter Turbulence
The announcement of Threads also comes as Twitter has imposed temporary limits on the amount of tweets that users can see.Musk said on Saturday that the move was in response to “extreme” levels of system manipulation and data scraping.
The limits rise to 1,000 posts per day for existing unverified accounts, meaning ones without a blue checkmark, while verified accounts enjoy ten times the volume, 10,000 posts, per day.
Musk said earlier that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” with a negative impact on user experience.
Musk Threatens to Sue Microsoft
In April, Musk threatened to sue Microsoft, which has invested billions in OpenAI, after accusing the company of using Twitter data for training.Musk’s tweet came shortly after Microsoft announced it was removing Twitter from one of its advertising platforms.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times on Musk’s lawsuit threat.
Earlier, the Twitter chief joined more than 1,100 individuals, including experts and industry executives such as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, in signing an open letter calling on all artificial intelligence labs to pause training of systems more powerful than Chat GPT-4 for at least six months.
Musk, along with other signatories of the letter, cited concerns over AI’s possible “risks to society and humanity.”
Gates recommended a more surgical approach to addressing the risks of AI by identifying the biggest risks and working on ways to mitigate them.