In the week since Mark Zuckerberg launched his Twitter competitor Threads, the tech billionaire has noted record user growth, saying July 10 that the new app surpassed 100 million sign-ups over the weekend.
And Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter and CEO of a growing number of companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, has spent the past week taking shots at Zuckerberg and his new platform in an attempt to discredit Meta's CEO and highlight the differences between their two apps.
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Musk, who has accused Zuckerberg of maliciously copying Twitter in order to create Threads, challenged Zuckerberg to a vulgar contest on July 10. He has also referred to the "false happiness" of Instagram, saying, "It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram."
In his latest attempt to ding the Meta CEO, Musk highlighted a tweet that shows a comparison between the Google Trends of "Twitter" versus "Threads" over the past week.
"Twitter Killer" is dying already. 🪦
— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) July 13, 2023
Twitter vs Meta's New App (Google Trends) pic.twitter.com/nBy0luFbOI
Google Trends tracks interest over time, applying numerical values to search popularity. A value of 100 indicates "peak popularity" for a given search term; a value of 50 is "half as popular."
According to Google Trends, Threads was briefly a more popular search time than Twitter, holding a score in the high 70s on July 6 before Twitter shot past it, hitting 100 the next day. The two briefly intersected on July 7, and Threads' search popularity has tumbled since then, hitting 6 as of July 13.
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Twitter's search popularity, meanwhile, has ebbed and flowed, gradually dipping to 37 on July 13, several times higher than Threads' score.
Musk replied to the tweet with a simple salute emoji.
🫡
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 13, 2023
"The goal is to keep it friendly as it expands," Zuckerberg wrote in a thread last week. "I think it's possible and will ultimately be the key to its success. That's one reason why Twitter never succeeded as much as I think it should have, and we want to do it differently."