Irish Examiner view: Tech giants with it all to lose

Musk v Zuckerberg

Fri, 23 Jun, 2023 - 02:00

At first glance it may resemble an April Fool’s gag that was a little late in getting into the public realm, but the news seems real.

Elon Musk, billionaire owner of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire owner of Meta, look ready to take each other on in a cage fight to be held in Las Vegas according to an exchange they had on — where else? — social media.

With a couple of high-profile celebrities such as these, the immediate impulse is to assign the roles of villain and hero, but that is quite the challenge here.

Musk’s stewardship of Twitter has seen the company drop to one-third of its value even as he used the platform to insult various people, including Bernie Sanders and Bill Gates.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook has been found guilty of several data breaches — last month Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was fined €1.2bn for one such breach by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission — and has been described by one of its original investors as a threat to US democracy.

Both of them embody a tech bro archetype, a personality of equal parts arrogance, irresponsibility, and essential strangeness. If this bout goes ahead, they could lose more than they win.

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