Elon Musk upped the ante in his escalating war of words with Mark Zuckerberg — calling the rival billionaire a “cuck” in a foul-mouthed tweet Sunday.
In the four days since Zuckerberg launched Threads — a direct app rival to Musk’s Twitter — the pair have been sparring with jibing posts on social media, threats of lawsuit, promises to duel in hand-to-hand combat, and now, with a personal insult.
“Zuck is a cuck,” Musk tweeted, responding to a Threads post from the official account of fast-food chain Wendy’s.
The burger joint had joked Zuckerberg “should go to space just to really make him mad lol” in a reference to Musk’s company SpaceX — to which the Facebook founder responded with a laughing emoji.
When a Twitter user reposted the exchange, Musk took notice and lashed out at Zuckerberg with the unseemly comment.
Commenters had mixed reactions: Some were appalled by Musk’s tweet, others said they initially thought it had come from a parody account — and many applauded the outrageous post.
Threads snagged more than 30 million users within a day of its launch Wednesday, an ominous sign for the stumbling Twitter.
Since Musk acquired Twitter in October, the social media platform has been cast into disarray as staffers are fired en masse, long-standing features like blue-check verification are reworked in ways that many say undermine its purpose, and the billionaire publicly changes company policies.
Zuckerberg launched Threads to work in conjunction with Instagram, and has already set about hoovering up users who’ve jumped ship in the wake of Twitter’s chaotic transition.
Musk immediately went into damage control mode, threatening to sue Threads’ parent company, Meta Platforms, a day after the launch.
In a letter sent to Zuckerberg, Musk’s Twitter lawyer Alex Spiro accused the company of intentionally creating a copycat platform, according to Semafore.
Spire wrote that Meta intentionally hired former Twitter employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
“Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights, and demands that Meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information,” he wrote.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee — that’s just not a thing,” a Meta spokesperson responded in a post on Threads.
“Competition is fine, cheating is not,” Musk tweeted later.
The rivalry began simmering in the days before Threads launched. In late June, Musk prodded Zuckerberg by challenging him to a “cage match.” A day later, Zuckerberg responded, saying “send me the location.”
