Call it a clash of the tech titans or a battle of the billionaires – Tesla’s Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have taken their long teased cage fight online and to the markets when the latter launched ‘Threads’ to challenge Twitter.

Already being titled the ‘Twitter-Killer’, the Threads social media platform comes when Twitter finds itself in a ‘weakened state’ after Musk’s US$44 billion takeover of the company resulted in the business losing its previously held value – alienating both users and clients/advertisers.

The skirmish started as a light-hearted exchange on the Musk-owned Twitter. It soon erupted into a media frenzy around two of the world’s richest men potentially throwing fists at each other in an actual mixed martial arts (MMA) style cage fight.

‘I’m up for a cage match if he is’ read a tweet by Musk in response to a warning issued by a Twitter-user, directed towards the Twitter boss, indicating that Zuckerberg practised the popular Brazilian martial art jiu jitsu.

What ensued was possibly a finely-crafted marketing campaign by Meta which got tweet-happy Musk to do most of the heavy lifting and prime social media users worldwide for the launch of Meta’s intended Twitter rival.

Threads garnered 10 million users within the first seven hours of its launch, wrote Meta CEO Mark Zukerberg in his first posts on the app.

Among the first to join the platform were brands like HBO and Netflix, social media-active politician and Democratic US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and celebrities Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lopez who have a commanding presence on social media.

As at 10th July, Threads crossed 100 million sign-ups within five days of launch to become the fastest-growing online platform to hit the milestone – even faster than AI platform sensation ChatGPT.

According to Danni Hewson, Head of Financial Analysis at investment firm AJ Bell, investors are bound to get ‘a little excited’ at the prospect of Meta’s ‘Twitter Killer’.

A major plus point for Threads is that users can log into the platform with the credentials they use for Instagram, another Meta-owned platform that has more than 2 billion monthly active users.

Musk, who in recent months has criticised Zuckerberg and mocked Meta’s plans to rival Twitter, may have found himself against the ropes for now. In the other corner a patient Zuckerberg says “We’re only in the opening moments of the first round here.”

Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future performance.