In the battle of Musk vs. Zuck, Zuckerberg is finally winning — for now

Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, sparking a social-media revolution that changed how we interact with friends and family online.

Controversy wasn't far behind. Early on, Zuckerberg was accused of stealing the platform idea from his Harvard peers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. Facebook settled a lawsuit with the Winklevoss brothers in 2008, paying them $20 million and 1.253 million shares in Facebook common stock. But the accusation stuck, and "to Zuckerberg" became internet slang used to refer to stealing an idea.

Over the years, Zuckerberg's public image took a beating — from an ill-advised 2016 Facebook livestream where he told viewers he would smoke meats in his backyard, to memes about his 2017 Harvard commencement speech. Zuckerberg has seemingly struggled to seem human and approachable.

Musk, on the other hand, perhaps made himself too accessible. He shared his first tweet in 2010, and built up a massive following on the platform. By 2018, he'd been dubbed the "first influencer CEO" by The Verge.

In 2018, Zuckerberg faced arguably the biggest blow to his reputation as the Cambridge Analytica scandal unfolded, in which Facebook was implicated in a breach of tens of millions of users' data.

Zuckerberg assumed responsibility for the data breach in a statement on Facebook and outlined steps to make the platform more secure. But user trust in Facebook, as well as in social media platforms more broadly, was hugely shaken by the scandal.

Zuckerberg's image also took a hit. His appearance before Congress to discuss the matter generated a swarm of memes about his behavior and mannerisms.

Musk was praised as a vanguard in the car industry, and SpaceX broke world records. But in 2018, his social media presence began taking up more oxygen.

In July, Musk attempted to get involved in the rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a cave by offering up the use of a SpaceX-produced mini-sub.

Vernon Unsworth, a cave diver involved in the rescue, criticized Musk's involvement in an interview with CNN, calling it a "PR stunt."

"He can stick his submarine where it hurts," Unsworth said in the interview.

Musk responded in a series of tweets where he referred to Unsworth as a "pedo guy," drawing much confusion and criticism online. Unsworth sued Musk for defamation over the tweet in 2019; Musk won the case.

In September, Musk smoked marijuana during an appearance on the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast. In response, Nasa launched a safety probe into Space X, and Musk became a meme once again.

Musk's air of irreverence has attracted many die-hard fans over the years, Amanda Silberling, a senior culture writer at TechCrunch, told BI.

"I think that he has appeal in the same way that Donald Trump had appeal to a lot of people, where people who felt that they were left out of politics were like, 'Oh, this guy is saying what everyone's thinking but no one's saying, so he's just like us,' even though of course, Trump is not just a random middle-class guy in Kansas."

There was a similar perception of Musk, Silberling said. "These random internet tech bros are like, 'Oh, he's a memer, or he's just like us," she explained, even though Musk, a billionaire CEO, is not, in fact, "just like" most people.

Musk's use of online humor and his prolific posting on social media appear to have played a key role in developing his "relatable" reputation over the years.

In 2021, the billionaire was even dubbed an "unlikely anti-establishment hero" by The New York Times after he shared a one-word tweet that sent stock prices for Gamestop soaring during the internet-fuelled buying frenzy of shares that wreaked havoc on Wall Street.

"He seems to have the internet coursing through his veins," David Gelles wrote for the Times in his description of the saga.

Musk "enjoyed a really long run of glowing positive, fawning coverage where he was basically regaled as the modern incarnation of Thomas Edison or an Albert Einstein. This kind of visionary, head and shoulders above any other mortals," Evan Nierman, CEO and founder of the public relations company Red Banyan, said.

That is, until he bought Twitter.

Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter in October 2022 after initially offering to buy the app in April of the same year.

It didn't take long for Musk to start ousting executives at the company. In early November 2022, he laid off hundreds of Twitter employees. He sent the remaining staff an email announcing his vision for a "Twitter 2.0," telling them they needed to be "extremely hardcore" and work long hours to make it happen.

Many of Musk's decisions regarding the platform have been highly criticized — including his changes to its verification system and his rebranding of the platform to X. By May, the company was worth only a third of what Musk paid for it, according to financial services corporation Fidelity.

As X's value tumbled, Musk's behavior on the platform became increasingly erratic. He reinstated the accounts of several figures who were previously banned from Twitter, including Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Andrew Tate, and even the European Commission expressed concern that hate speech and disinformation was rife on the platform under his leadership.

His endorsement of an antisemitic X post in November didn't improve this perception, even though he later seemed to backtrack after the White House called his response an "abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate."

Musk's management of X — and much of what he chooses to share via his personal account — has left a stain on his reputation, according to Evan Nierman, CEO and founder of the public relations company Red Banyan. "I think the days of him being treated like a sainted savant are behind him," he said.

As Silberling put it, Musk's handling of Twitter is "making people realize that just because someone is a billionaire doesn't mean that they are a business genius."

When Meta launched its Twitter rival app Threads in July, it gained over 10 million users in its first seven hours and immediately sparked memes forecasting the end of Twitter's relevance. Zuckerberg himself got in on the action, tweeting a popular meme of Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man, referencing the similarity between the two apps. In doing so, he appeared to beat Musk, known for his boisterous internet jokes, at his own game.

The pair exchanged a series of back-and-forth jabs, culminating in chatter about the possibility of a literal cage fight between them. Photos of a newly "shredded Zuck" surfaced, and old images of a shirtless Musk in Mykonos from 2022, which were heavily memed at the time, popped up on the timeline.

But after teasing the internet for weeks, Zuckerberg finally shot down the potential fight in a Threads post in August, writing, "I think we can all agree Elon isn't serious, and it's time to move on."

Still, according to Nierman, the exchange helped boost Zuckerberg's image because it showed a new side to the billionaire that people hadn't seen before.

"Musk has been so publicly so obnoxious in recent years that he makes Zuckerberg look tame," Silberling said. But Zuckerberg is still perceived as something of a threat: "People see him as the guy whose company probably knows more about us than we know about ourselves."

Threads might have been hailed by some as the "new Twitter" when it first launched, but Nierman said it could just as easily be "written off as a colossal failure" in time if people stop using it.

Within weeks of its launch, Reuters reported that Zuckerberg had admitted that Threads lost more than half of its initial user base, and people quickly expressed doubts about the app's appeal. In October, Zuckerberg announced the launch of new poll and GIF features on the app, which TechCrunch's Sarah Perez described as a move to compete with X.

Silberling told BI that Zuckerberg and Musk are "held to higher standards" than the average celebrity due to the way their decisions can impact large numbers of online consumers.

But both are wealthy enough to be comfortably insulated from public ire. Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, with a net worth of $252.6 billion, and Zuckerberg is the fifth-richest, worth $124 billion, according to Forbes.

"We live and breathe in these minutes in time, but reputations are built over years and a lifetime," Nierman said. "When it comes to Zuckerberg and Musk, we're not going to be able to decide or determine with finality how they were seen, how they were perceived, and what their legacy is, for a very long time."