How an exploding rocket triggered an epic rivalry between Musk and Zuckerberg
It started with a rocket explosion; it may end in a cage fight.
Mark Zuckerberg was in Nairobi, his first visit to Africa as he sought to encourage more people across the continent to sign up to Facebook.
Alongside meeting local entrepreneurs on the 2016 trip, Zuckerberg had another reason to visit: his giant social network would soon be providing satellite internet to much of sub-Saharan Africa.
That day, a satellite provided by the French operator Eutelsat, paid for by Facebook, was due to launch from Florida. The $200m (£157m) Amos-6 transmitter would provide free internet to remote communities, a major part of Facebook’s plans to expand its potential user base.
The satellite never made it off the launch pad, however. The Falcon 9 rocket carrying it, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, exploded as it tried to take off, destroying the satellite with it, in what the rocket company called an “anomaly”.
The normally reserved Zuckerberg was furious. “As I’m here in Africa, I’m deeply disappointed to hear that SpaceX’s launch failure destroyed our satellite that would have provided connectivity to so many entrepreneurs and everyone else across the continent,” he wrote online.
The two had sparred before – Zuckerberg had previously called Musk’s warnings that artificial intelligence created an existential threat “hysterical” – but if there was a moment that turned them into enemies, it was the rocket failure.
For Zuckerberg, it dealt a possibly fatal blow to his project to provide free internet to the world.
Musk did not respond directly to Zuckerberg at the time, but responding to a tweet posted by a reporter in 2018, he said: “Yeah, my fault for being an idiot.
“We did give them [Facebook] a free launch to make up for it, and I think they had some insurance.”
The incident occurred before Musk became the world’s richest man and before SpaceX became the dominant space player it is today.
Zuckerberg, meanwhile, was yet to become the face of the tech backlash: Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, which saw many commentators turn on Facebook as a scapegoat, was still months away.
On Thursday, the rivalry between the two became all-out warfare, as Zuckerberg’s company, Meta, released a direct alternative to Twitter, which Musk paid $44bn (£35bn) for last November.
Zuckerberg said he believed the service could reach 1bn users – around three times what Twitter is believed to have – and that Musk’s company “hasn’t nailed it” in building a public conversations app.
But the rivalry between the two billionaires – with a combined wealth of $355bn – has been brewing for years.
Musk and Zuckerberg are believed to have first bonded over a shared interest in AI, even if the two disagreed.
In 2014, Zuckerberg invited the Tesla chief executive to his house, alongside Facebook’s experts. Musk refused to be convinced, and subsequently phoned Facebook’s AI head Yann LeCun as part of an attempt to recruit Tesla Autopilot engineers.
Musk later responded to Zuckerberg’s claim that Musk’s position was “irresponsible” by saying that the Facebook founder’s “understanding of the subject is limited”.
As Facebook became a lightning rod for criticism amid privacy controversies and claims of election interference, Musk used his growing public profile to stick the knife in.
In the days following the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, he ordered staff to delete Tesla and SpaceX’s Facebook pages, saying the social network “gives me the willies”.
Having once been a prolific Instagram user, he later deleted the account, telling SpaceX lobbyist Juleanna Glover: “I just deleted my Instagram. Weak sauce.”
It came just weeks after it emerged that Facebook was planning to challenge Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service with its own low-earth orbit system called Athena (the project was ultimately shelved and sold to Amazon a few years later).
A lack of an Instagram account was no barrier to Musk becoming one of the internet’s main characters, however: he rode his Twitter account and its 147m followers to prominence, using it to make repeated barbs at Facebook.
In 2021 he encouraged followers to switch from Meta’s messaging app WhatsApp to the privacy-focused Signal, and earlier this year declared that “WhatsApp cannot be trusted”.
The rivalry escalated when Musk acquired Twitter, a company that Zuckerberg once described as a “clown car that fell into a gold mine”, and became more intense as it emerged that Meta was planning its own Twitter rival.
Zuckerberg’s motivations could be questioned.
Twitter has only twice turned an annual profit, and brought in just $5.1bn in revenue in 2021, its last full year as a public company; Meta’s revenue was $117.9bn in the same year – 23 times that of its smaller rival.
It is possible that personal pride, rather than financial sanity, prompted the launch of Threads.
With two normal billionaires, this business rivalry would be settled in terms of market share and revenues. But Musk and Zuckerberg – 52 and 39 respectively – are now preparing to make their bitter rivalry physical.
Many expected the pair to be joking when each said last month that they were open to a cage match in Las Vegas. But the event is reportedly now in the planning stages, coordinated by the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Both billionaires are tapping up high-profile fighters as training partners: Zuckerberg, who has been on an 18-month fitness transformation, spent much of Threads’ first few hours conversing with mixed martial arts practitioners.
Musk was pictured in training with Georges St-Pierre, a legendary fighter, earlier this week.
The sight of two of the world’s wealthiest men in a no-holds barred duel is hard to imagine. But if it comes to that, neither is likely to lack motivation.
