If only tweets could come true. Wouldn’t you love to see Elon Musk fight Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight?
I’m no fan of physical confrontations like boxing or mixed martial arts – but I’m sure I could eat a bowl of popcorn watching the two mega-dorks of all geekdom fight it out. All of geekdom, as it happens, seems to be thrilled at the prospect. There are memes and everything.
Zuckerberg would obviously win because the Facebook CEO is a practising health fanatic with an overzealous competitive streak, who has recently embraced competitive jiu-jitsu.
Just kiss already
“I’m up for a cage match if he is lol.” Musk tweeted last month, in response to a thread about rumours that Facebook wanted to start its own Twitter alternative, called Threads. Musk warned that this would put us all “exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options”.
He’s not far off. Facebook has 2.98bn monthly active users, WhatsApp has about 3bn, Instagram has 2bn and Messenger has 931m, according to Bing. Holding company Meta said 3.81bn people use at least one of these services every month, during the first quarter of 2023. That’s nearly half of the world’s 8bn population.
Musk is right that we should be scared. If only a cage fight could fix it.
This is not the first time Pretoria’s otherwise least-aggressive son has challenged someone to a fight. He tweeted in March 2022 that he would take on Russian President Vladimir Putin in “single combat” after he invaded Ukraine. Another bout the boxing non-watchers yearned to see materialise.
Similarly, Musk vs Zuck – the rumble in, er, silicon valley – won’t come to pass, obviously. But it makes a nice distraction from the usual antics over at Twitter and Facebook.
At the beginning of July, Twitter was dragged into another round of scandalised, outraged headlines after Musk ordered a “temporary emergency measure” to limit the number of tweets people can read a day. This is to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) systems from “scraping” data off Twitter’s website.
Verified users were limited to 6,000 posts a day and normal accounts could see 600. Musk has since increased that to 10,000 and 1,000 – saying this is because of “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.
“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users,” he added.
It was, well, a storm in a Twitter cup. As much as it does seem like an arbitrary number to settle on, I honestly can’t imagine actually reading 600 tweets a day. I am much more guarded over my attention today than I was a decade ago during the heyday of social media. Back then, there was always such delightful happenstance and capricious discoveries.
But, in an ever-decreasing world of quality, I have returned to first principles. I read the publications I know and trust. These are mainstream media, which are so often the butt of derision and scorn. I know I will find good, accurate stories in the New York Times and The Guardian, so I get my international news directly from their apps. I do the same with local news, especially the Financial Mail and Scrolla.Africa; and similarly with tech news. I go straight to the sources of the news.
Twitter is mostly for serendipity or a glimpse into what the Twitterati are outraged about. It hasn’t been a serious place for a long time – not when a mock cage fight challenge is the most exciting thing.
- This column was first published on Financial Mail