Social media users have posted several simulations about the fight between two tech titans.
Two tech titans – Twitter boss Elon Musk and Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg – set the online world on fire by responding to each other’s cage match challenge. Mr Musk even spiced it up by posting a tweet saying there is “some chance” that the fight could happen at the most legendary battleground in the world – Rome’s Colosseum. But ultimately, the news is about creating a buzz around two of the biggest social media platforms and comes just as Meta announced a rival to Twitter.
The Facebook’s parent has listed a new app in stores as “Threads, an Instagram app” and is expected to be launched on Thursday (July 6).
The two men have clashed for years but a recent comment by a Meta executive suggesting that Twitter was not run “sanely” irked Mr Musk, eventually leading to the two men offering each other out for a cage fight.
The current buzz has its genesis in the announcement made by Mr Zuckerberg in February about ‘Threads’ with “increased authenticity” and “security across services” – both digs at Twitter Blue.
Since taking over Twitter in October last year, Mr Musk has implemented a number of changes, including the most recent one about limiting the number of tweets different categories of users can view.
Though the world’s richest man said the move is aimed to check “data scraping”, it created furore among social media users.
While alternative microblogging sites – such as Mastodon and Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey’s Blue Sky – have seen an uptick in user numbers since Mr Musk’s acquisition, neither has been able to challenge Twitter, which has an estimated 250 million users.
But Instagram already has hundreds of millions of registered users and has a history of introducing new features based on the success of other social media firms.
In 2016, it added a feature called “stories” to Instagram, or user posts that disappear after a fixed amount of time, in response to the rising popularity of Snapchat.
More recently, the company’s short-form video feature “Reels” has sought to challenge the rise of TikTok.
As far as the cage fight is concerned – if at all it happens – the news has spread like wildfire on social media and led to various speculations about the outcome.
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There are several stimulations on Twitter in which AI-generated and morphed videos show both the tech titans fighting each other.
As far as training is concerned, Mr Zuckerberg, 39, is an amateur mixed martial arts fighter and trained in jiu-jitsu. Fifty-one-year-old Mr Musk, meanwhile, is a self-proclaimed street fighter and a trainer.
It was Mr Musk who first challenged Mr Zuckerberg to a “cage match”. The Meta chief accepted the challenge by responding “Send Me Location”.
Despite the buzz, there is no confirmation that the fight will actually take place.