Mark Zuckerberg Is Gradually Gaining the Upper Hand in His Battle with Elon Musk

We’re probably never going to get that Mark Zuckerberg-Elon Musk showdown in the octagon, but it seems that Zuck (and his newfound alpha persona) is intent on giving Musk swirlies in other ways. For instance, it appears Threads, Instagram’s Twitter clone that emerged as an alternative to the Musk-managed hellscape that is X, is steadily catching up to its primary competitor in daily users.

Citing data from Similarweb, TechCrunch reports that Threads hit 115.1 million daily active users on mobile devices in June, putting it within spitting distance of X’s 132 million daily active users during the same period. Just as notable is the fact that the growth charts are going in the exact opposite direction. Threads has experienced a 127.8% growth in active users year-over-year, while Musk’s platform has watched its user base erode by 15.2% during that time.

Now, there is one sizable caveat here that probably speaks to the types of users that these platforms attract. X still dominates web-based users. Per TechCrunch, the social platform that remains the favorite among newsbreakers and the terminally online still pulled in about 145.8 million visits per day on desktop in June, while Threads had just 6.9 million. That’s likely due to the fact that legacy users are accustomed to Twitter for desktop, while Threads is a mobile-first platform. It might also suggest that while Threads is catching up in users, many people check it the same way they do Instagram: open it, scroll a bit, and sign off. X still seems to have a dedicated group of sickos refreshing constantly.

If you’re wondering where Bluesky factors into all of this, it kinda doesn’t. The platform did blow up a bit, particularly for those who found Musk’s ownership of X to be a non-negotiable problem, and it has experienced 372.5% growth year-over-year, according to TechCrunch. But that growth has only gotten it to about 4.1 million daily active users and 37 million registered users in total. It’s still very much the small fish in the big pond here.

There’s definitely an “everyone loses” vibe when it comes to picking between Musk and Zuck as the primary owner of your preferred microblogging platform of choice. Sure, Zuckerberg didn’t give a fascist-like salute or run a pseudo-agency that aimed to destroy federal government infrastructure from the inside, but he did give money and support to the guy who enabled Musk to do that.

The jump from Musk to Zuckerberg seems like maybe a marginal improvement. It’s certainly no cage match—which holds the distinct advantage of getting the two of them in the same place for the slim-but-not-technically-impossible possibility that an asteroid strikes right where they are standing—but it’s something.