This summer season, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk blew the web’s thoughts by claiming they might combat one another in a “cage match”-style brawl. The rival tech execs had been feuding over their platforms’ competition in the microblogging space and their proposed resolution to this rivalry was to beat the crap out of one another in entrance of a stay viewers. Zuck had been training UFC-style, making him a tad extra threatening than his earlier iteration as a hoodied Harvard loser. Musk, alternatively, mentioned he would shed some kilos and get a trainer. The combat promised to be one of the vital memorable occasions in net historical past.
In fact, this much anticipated event never materialized. Musk allegedly saved dodging Zuck on plans for the combat, which led Zuck to name the entire thing off. Because of this, we could by no means know which middle-aged billionaire is best at hand at hand fight. That mentioned, for those who had been to measurement them up by the yr they’ve had, it might be arduous to argue that there hasn’t been a transparent victor. Certainly, between the 2 of them, Zuck is clearly the undisputed champ of 2023.
The explanations for this needs to be apparent. Musk had a horrible yr. Most notably, the billionaire launched into a buffoonish journey to remake Twitter, his ill-advised acquisition. This effort, which concerned renaming the platform “X” and trying to remodel it right into a so-called “all the pieces app,” floundered from the get-go. Musk frequently claimed that X can be actually, actually superior simply as quickly as the mandatory adjustments had been made. In fact, a complete lot of adjustments later, issues are nonetheless very un-awesome. The platform, which seems near death, has induced Musk nothing however grief over the past twelve months.
On the identical time, Musk has additionally been struggling on a number of, different fronts. Along with struggling an increasing amount of flak and status decline for his, let’s assume, free-spirited opinions, Musk’s automobile firm, Tesla, is beneath assault by a cadre of pissed off Swedish labor unions. It seems the world’s richest man simply can’t catch a break.
By comparability, Zuck has managed to remain comparatively scandal free all through 2023 whereas additionally eeking out some victories that no person actually thought had been potential. Living proof, a report printed Monday confirmed that Meta’s inventory is on monitor to have its greatest yr ever. CNBC experiences that the corporate’s inventory rose a whopping 178 p.c over the previous twelve months. Which means it’s having a greater yr than 2013, when its inventory rose 105 p.c following its IPO. In fact, it bears consideration that Zuck managed to realize that stage of company buoyancy by firing a whole lot of people. Certainly, in a yr stuffed with Silicon Valley layoffs, Meta’s cost-cutting technique stood out as particularly bloodthirsty.
At any fee, Zuck’s fundamental accomplishment has been to tug Meta out of its earlier death spiral. Lest you’ve forgotten, the corporate spent most of 2022 hemorrhaging cash and changing into an ever greater laughingstock as a result of, in response to a sequence of public scandals (the Facebook Papers, anyone?), Zuck insisted on pivoting his firm away from its conventional enterprise and in direction of a quixotic effort to build “the metaverse.” The Meta CEO was a steadfast believer in the concept his firm may singlehandedly assist create an expanded marketplace for digital actuality providers, thus ushering within the subsequent epoch of the web. As a substitute, his technique principally led the corporate to lose gargantuan amounts of money, credibility, and inventory worth.
This yr has supplied Meta a possibility to pivot as soon as once more, avoid wasting face, and look actually good compared to competitor Musk’s flailing dumpster fireplace of a yr. Meta’s launch of Threads was, if not precisely a blockbuster success, at the least a modest one compared to X.
Whereas Zuck is the clear winner of 2023, what subsequent yr holds for each tech oligarchs is anyone’s guess. Zuck is seemingly planning for the longer term by constructing a doomsday bunker and Musk appears to have designs on his own university and, probably, a moon base. As Zuck’s personal reversal of fortune proves, the longer term is unwritten and nobody is aware of what the brand new yr will convey.
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