Elon Musk Takes on Mark Zuckerberg's Empire

They are not friends and do not hide it. 

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have a feisty relationship. 

The former, who is the CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla  (TSLA) - Get Free Report, went so far as to dub the latter "Zuck the Fourteenth" in an apparent nod to French King Louis the XIV, famous for his hubris and excess.

He did so when he was pushing back, on April 2022, on a potential conflict of interest between him owning Twitter and being one of its most influential users, during a TED interview with Chris Anderson.

"I wouldn't personally be, uh, you know, in their editing tweets," Musk, known as the Techno King at Tesla, said on April 14, 2022, just after he made a bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion. "But you'll know if something was done to, to promote demo or otherwise affect a tweet, you know."

"As for media sort of ownership, I mean, you've got, you know, Zuck work [at and owning] Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, and with a share ownership structure that will have Zuckerberg the 14th still controlling those entities. [We] certainly we won't have that at Twitter. If you commit to opening up the algorithm, that definitely gives some level of confidence."

'Normal People'

Basically, for Musk, Zuckerberg is an omnipresent emperor with dictatorial impulses. 

In addition to directly attacking Zuckerberg, the serial entrepreneur regularly goes after Instagram, one of the jewels of his rival's social media empire. 

A few months later, Zuckerberg answered him indirectly by saying that "normal people" won't want Musk's brain chips, developed by Neuralink, a company Musk co-founded, in their heads.

"Normal people I think in the next 10 or 15 years are probably not going to want to get something just installed in their brain for fun," Zuckerberg told controversial podcaster Joe Rogan in August 2022.

The two men are also rivals. They fight to be the most powerful tech luminaries by controlling the most influential platforms. Meta Platforms, Zuckerberg's social media empire, is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, three of the most popular platforms. Musk has been the owner of Twitter, considered the town square of our time, since the end of October. He is also the most influential personality on the microblogging site and uses his brand and name to attract other influencers and creators.

Zuckerberg and Musk are therefore also fighting for advertiser dollars. For a long time, the rivalry has remained very clean: Musk has often sought to establish a contrast between the two. He mainly questions the role of the two platforms and their impact on society.

"Instagram makes people depressed & Twitter makes people angry," the billionaire wrote on Jan. 15. "Which is better?"

But this rivalry has just taken a dirty turn. Musk seems to want to orchestrate the fall of his rival by attacking one of Meta's jewels. This is WhatsApp. The tech mogul is seeking to discredit the messaging app, by claiming it is untrustworthy. This assertion goes to the very heart of privacy, one of the concerns of users of social networks.

'WhatsApp Cannot Be trusted'

It all started with a user's tweet suggesting being listened to or being spied on by the app. The user describes themselves as an engineer who works at Twitter, and who previously worked at Google.

"WhatsApp has been using the microphone in the background, while I was asleep and since I woke up at 6AM (and that's just a part of the timeline!)," the engineer, whose name is Foad Dabiri, posted on May 9, with what appears to be a photo of the timeline to corroborate his allegation. "What's going on?"

Musk immediately, launched a serious accusation based on this testimony alone.

"WhatsApp cannot be trusted," Musk said on Twitter on May 9.

The accusation has the merit of refreshing the memories of the scandals that have affected Meta Platforms in recent years and which boil down to a sensitive point: trust. The social network had allowed Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm, which partnered with the Donald Trump campaign team ahead of the 2016 presidential election, to harvest private data from tens of millions of its users, allowing it to profile voters.

"Over the last 24 hours we’ve been in touch with a Twitter engineer who posted an issue with his Pixel phone and WhatsApp," WhatsApp responded on Twitter. "We believe this is a bug on Android that mis-attributes information in their Privacy Dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and remediate."

The app added that: "Users have full control over their mic settings. Once granted permission, WhatsApp only accesses the mic when a user is making a call or recording a voice note or video - and even then, these communications are protected by end-to-end encryption so WhatsApp cannot hear them."

This didn't stop the Techno King to continue his campaign against Meta.

"It's incredible how many people don't realize that WhatsApp is owned by Meta/Facebook," investor Gannon Breslin commented on Musk's message.

"Yeah," Musk quipped. "Or that WhatsApp founders left Meta/Facebook in disgust, started #deletefacebook campaign & made major contributions to building Signal."

"What they learned about Facebook & changes to WhatsApp obviously disturbed them greatly," Musk argued.

'#DeleteFacebook'

Musk referred to the fact that Jan Koum and Brian Acton, WhatsApp's cofounders, left the company a few years after it was bought by Meta. Like Instagram's founders, Koum and Acton did not approve of Facebook's policies and decisions, particularly with regard to the processing of personal data. There were internal conflicts between them and the executives of their parent company Facebook, which has largely reshaped the model of their app.

Acton explained later that he left because he disagreed with Zuckerberg and then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, when Meta questioned the adequacy of the WhatsApp encryption protocol he helped develop. They saw it, Acton said, as a barrier to delivering targeted ads and facilitating commercial messaging.

When Acton left Meta, he surprised many by tweeting "It is time. #deletefacebook." He was supporting what many called a movement, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Another notable move was his $50 million investment in a foundation to manage the Signal app encryption protocol.

Founded in 2009, WhatsApp was using encrypted messaging, which had earned it a reputation as a privacy-friendly app, before being bought by Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.