Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during his visit at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation ... [+]
Elon Musk proposed a new contest with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday. But it might make major advertisers even more nervous about returning to Twitter. What does Musk have in mind? The 52-year-old billionaire has suggested they measure their respective manhoods. Seriously.
“I propose a literal d*ck measuring contest,” Musk tweeted on Sunday night, complete with an emoji of a ruler.
Musk sent the tweet as a follow-up to something he’d tweeted roughly 9 hours earlier, proclaiming “Zuck is a cuck.”
The proposal comes just two weeks after Musk and Zuckerberg swore to physically fight each other in a literal cage match. It’s still unclear if the fight will actually happen, but Musk has tweeted photos of himself with trainers. Zuckerberg was training in jiu jitsu even before this billionaire bout was proposed.
Musk spent a good deal of Sunday tweeting, with particular focus on Zuckerberg, whose company Meta recently launched a rival to Twitter called Threads. Zuckerberg’s platform has already attracted over 70 million users, a number built mostly on the fact that Threads makes it easy for anyone with an Instagram account to join the new service.
There’s speculation that Zuckerberg even moved up the planned launch of Threads early to capitalize on what’s been seen as chaos at Twitter. While pitching internet celebrities on Threads, Meta was reportedly billing the new social media platform as a “sane” alternative to Twitter, according to a report from the Verge.
What chaos, exactly? Everything from Musk declaring that the completely innocuous word “cisgender” is now a slur to an announcement that Tweetdeck would soon become a subscriber-only feature.
To top it all off, Musk also announced last weekend that most users would be limited to reading just 600 tweets per day, something the Atlantic humorously compared to placing a 12-item limit for all shoppers at Costco. And while the rates have been lifted considerably since then, and perhaps even removed completely, the move allowed competitors to take advantage of the situation. In fact, Twitter competitor Bluesky, which was recently started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, saw such an influx of new users last weekend that it had trouble keeping up and had to temporarily pause new sign-ups. Bluesky, it should be noted, is still in beta testing and not open to the broader public.
But none of these efforts by competitors have been pleasing Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion late last year. Musk handed the CEO role in early June to NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino, who has been widely seen as just the kind of person who could make brands feel safe on Twitter again. But it seems like Musk is doing everything in his power to make it clear that Twitter is a free-for-all and he likes it that way. It’s hard to think of any other explanation for why a man like Musk, with so much money invested in making Twitter an attractive place for advertisers, would be proposing the kinds of contests that he is with Zuckerberg.
Where does Twitter go from here? Your guess is as good as mine, but Musk isn’t making Yaccarino’s job any easier. And if advertisers were nervous before—as some refused to even be seen with Musk at a marketing conference back in April—they’re even more nervous now.
