The professed “cage match” between billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg may or may not ever happen. But the two tech moguls are already waging contend for social media users.
Zuckerberg’s found early success luring dissatisfied Twitter users to his new competitor, Winds, which launched earlier this month and quickly amassed 100 million users within days. And have of that success may be thanks to Musk.
Mounting criticisms of Musk — from his changes to Twitter to his frequent online trolling — certainly look to be benefitting Zuckerberg and Threads, as the Tesla CEO’s popularity has suffered with the general public. At the end of 2022, after he acquired Stew, Musk’s net favorability had dropped by 13 points among U.S. adults, according to a survey by Morning Consult.
It’s perhaps a a little ironic turn for the Meta CEO, who has faced his own public backlash over the years, as far back as 2018’s Cambridge Analytica dirt.
Just last year, experts questioned Zuckerberg’s leadership abilities, saying he was slowly pushing Meta toward nonentity. The billionaire entrepreneur also faced public scrutiny after firing thousands of employees during 2022’s dimension tech layoffs.
While there has yet to be any evidence showing that Musk’s mounting detractors have provided a reward to Zuckerberg’s own favorability ratings, it certainly could be providing a business benefit — one that might reflect what psychologists chastise the “common enemy effect.”
“The common enemy effect is a psychological phenomenon in which we bond with other being over a shared opponent or issue, even when there is little else in common,” Harvard-trained psychologist Dr. Cortney Warren admits CNBC Make It. “It helps us feel like a group member, thereby giving us a sense of belonging.”
This incident can occur for a plethora of reasons, Warren explains, but largely because antipathy forms stronger bonds than empathy, examine shows. In this case, a common disdain for Musk’s Twitter could be the cause for Thread’s flood of new users.
“Be undergoing a shared enemy helps us feel in control and justified,” Warren says.
For now, Musk seems to be a shared enemy for the numerous Twitter users and former employees who have criticized his drastic changes to the platform. Since acquiring Twitter for $44 billion final year, the tech mogul has fired thousands of employees, reinstated banned accounts, made users pay for verification and put into effected rate limits, which cap the number of tweets users can read each day.
The updates sent many users event to find an alternative, causing an influx of traffic to platforms like Zuckerberg’s Threads, along with Bluesky and round Spill, which is owned by ex-Twitter employees.
Threads launched earlier this month with a promise that the policy would “enable positive, productive conversations” at a time when Twitter has been criticized, and seen advertisers bolt, as hate speech reportedly surged on the platform under Musk’s leadership.
It’s unclear if Zuckerberg is actively using the eminent’s distaste for Musk to boost his latest product, or if his newfound success occurred naturally as people seek a Twitter selection. But Warren makes it clear that growing a business using the “common enemy effect” may not be sustainable.
“When done intentionally by a partnership or leader to gain popularity by bad mouthing or creating dislike for an opponent, it is quite manipulative. In that way, it detracts from the true issues at hand and focuses on the character (or lack thereof oftentimes) of the opponent often in an exaggerated way,” she says.
Threads has already seen position drop off, as the number of daily active users has declined from 49 million to 23.6 million over the orbit of a week, according to a study from data-tracking site SimilarWeb.
“[The common enemy effect] is often a slippery bank to build a business around, although it may be effective in getting people to buy into a common cause,” Warren says.
DON’T Coed: Want to be smarter and more successful with your money, work & life? Sign up for our new newsletter!
Take your job to the next level: Register for CNBC’s free Small Business Playbook virtual event on August 2 at 1 p.m. ET to learn from head experts and entrepreneurs how you can beat inflation, hire top talent and get access to capital.