Elon Musk’s recently acquired Twitter has a rival that’s owned by his adversary i.e., Facebook (Metta) founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media platform now has a text-based app called Threads.

abc.net.au reports that 10 million users signed up in seven hours, with big stars such as actor Chris Hemsworth and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese amongst the ‘Threadsters’ who now can do their thing on Threads instead of Elon’s baby Twitter.

That baby cost him $44 billion in October last year. By May this year, experts at Fidelity said it had lost two-thirds of its value.

“Twitter has struggled financially since Musk took over. After saddling the company with $13 billion of debt, Musk’s erratic decision making and challenges with content moderation led advertising revenue to decline by 50%, Musk said in March,” says time.com writers Aisha Counts and Tom Maloney. “An attempt to recoup that revenue by selling Twitter Blue subscriptions has so far failed to take off. At the end of March, less than 1% of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up.”

But don’t stress out about Elon’s bad business luck.

“The latest markdown erases about $850 million from Musk’s $187 billion fortune, according to the index. Despite Twitter’s issues, Musk’s wealth is up more than $48 billion this year, largely due to a 63% surge in Tesla Inc.’s share price,” the Time team report.

So, Twitter’s apparent fall in value was from $44 billion down to $8 billion and the arrival of Threads is undoubtedly going to hit Elon’s twit-like investment again. But as I’ve pointed out, he can afford it!

Not surprisingly, Zuckerberg has taken to Twitter to teasingly announce the new kid in text-town, using a meme from Spiderman to stick it to Elon.

ABC says these guys have been having a go at each other for months. There has been talk of a physical match off in a cage in Las Vegas, but that looks more like PR trash talk to keep their businesses front and centre with Joe Public.

They’ve learnt this from the master of free PR Richard Branson, who built the Virgin brand off knowing what the media would chase to give him free ‘advertising’ worth billions over the decades, when he was an unstoppable business-building force. On the subject of those who can manipulate the media and who joined Threads was Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, whose survival has to be a lesson for everyone in and out of business on how to win friends and influence customers/voters!

The ABC says others who joined included Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney, and Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek.

And what a lesson this is for anyone in business, actor Chris Hemsworth already has 500,000 followers on Threads after one day!

The Threads app allows users to import their Instagram usernames and profiles (including their verification status) directly into Threads. Zuckerberg wants to do what Instagram does audio-visually but via text.

This is not the first time Twitter has had rivals but who has ever heard of Mastodon or Bluesky? The big threat for Musk’s Twitter is Meta’s size and money and it comes at a time when left-wing users of Twitter have a clear disdain for the owner, who recently introduced rules that weren’t widely applauded.

The Twitter boss told users who pay for a “verified” account that they were limited to reading 6,000 tweets a day. Meanwhile, users with unverified accounts were limited to 600 tweets per day, while new unverified accounts could read 300 per day.

I can see Twitter and Threads becoming a right-v-left social media platform battle over time but given the left-leaning of those who use Twitter, it doesn’t augur well for Elon’s baby, as Threads could become a refuge for those who don’t like the new rules and political points of view of Twitter’s new master.