This summer time, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk blew the web’s thoughts by claiming they’d battle one another in a “cage match”-style brawl. The rival tech execs had been feuding over their platforms’ competitors within the microblogging house and their proposed resolution to this rivalry was to beat the crap out of one another in entrance of a reside viewers. Zuck had been coaching UFC-style, making him a tad extra threatening than his earlier iteration as a hoodied Harvard loser. Musk, alternatively, stated he would shed some kilos and get a coach. The battle promised to be one of the crucial memorable occasions in internet historical past.
Of course, this a lot anticipated occasion by no means materialized. Musk allegedly saved dodging Zuck on plans for the battle, which led Zuck to name the entire thing off. As a end result, we might by no means know which middle-aged billionaire is healthier at hand handy fight. That stated, when you had been to dimension them up by the yr they’ve had, it could be onerous to argue that there has’t been a transparent victor. Indeed, between the 2 of them, Zuck has clearly been the undisputed champ of 2023.
The causes for this ought 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 making an attempt to remodel it right into a so-called “everything app,” floundered from the get-go. Musk regularly claimed that X could be actually, actually superior simply as quickly as the mandatory modifications had been made. Of course, a complete lot of modifications later, issues are nonetheless very un-awesome. The platform, which appears close to loss of life, has triggered Musk nothing however grief over the past twelve months.
At the identical time, Musk has additionally been struggling on a number of, different fronts. In addition to struggling an rising quantity of flak and status decline for his, shall we embrace, free-spirited opinions, Musk’s automobile firm, Tesla, is underneath 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 one actually thought had been doable. Case in level, a report printed Monday confirmed that Meta’s inventory is on observe to have its greatest yr ever. CNBC stories that the corporate’s inventory rose a whopping 178 p.c over the previous twelve months. That means it’s having a greater yr than 2013, when its inventory rose 105 p.c following its IPO. Of course, it bears consideration that Zuck managed to achieve that degree of company buoyancy by firing a complete lot of individuals. Indeed, in a yr stuffed with Silicon Valley layoffs, Meta’s cost-cutting technique stood out as significantly bloodthirsty.
At any charge, Zuck’s most important accomplishment has been to drag Meta out of its earlier loss of life spiral. Lest you’ve forgotten, the corporate spent most of 2022 hemorrhaging cash and turning into an ever greater laughingstock as a result of, in response to a sequence of great public scandals (the Facebook Papers, anybody?), Zuck insisted on pivoting his firm away from its conventional enterprise technique and in direction of a quixotic effort to construct “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. Instead, his technique largely led the corporate to lose gargantuan quantities of cash, credibility, and inventory worth.
This yr has offered Meta a chance 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, no less than a modest one compared to X.
While 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 long run by constructing a doomsday bunker and Musk appears to have designs on his personal college and, doubtlessly, a moon base. As Zuck’s personal reversal of fortune proves, the long run is unwritten and nobody is aware of what the brand new yr will carry.