2023-06-22 20:30:57
Meta is preparing to launch a new platform through Instagram (code name, Project 92) to compete with Twitter and Elon Musk, master of this network, challenges Mark Zuckerberg, the competitor, to a duel, who immediately replies with a curt «tell me where». Seeing two of the most important, wealthy and influential entrepreneurs in the world, two visionaries eager for the future – one who proposes to enter his virtual reality Metaverse, the other who even wants to take us to Mars – conceive (perhaps in a semi-serious way) the he use of 19th-century methods to settle a dispute smacks of traveling in a time machine. When, in 1986, Romano Prodi, then president of IRI, tried to sell Alfa Romeo to Ford rather than sell it to Fiat, Gianni Agnelli, who was also very nostalgic for cavalry charges, never thought of a duel (real or figurative) to put the Americans out of the game: he found other ways to secure control of Alfa. The digital theater in which the master of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter reacts to Zuckerberg’s landing in his market area by challenging him to a duel not with foil or saber, but in a primordial physical fight with bare hands in the cage of immediately accepted cage fighting, could be dismissed as the comic fairy tale set up by two self-centered narcissists, given Musk’s sarcastic threat: “I’ll rely on my secret weapon, the walrus move: I’ll mount you and do nothing”.
But the case also makes us reflect on how much and how the psychology, language, way of communicating and competing of the big capitalists is changing (the companies of the two are among the largest in the world, considered more powerful than many States) and also on the profound differences between Musk and Zuckerberg: apparently similar in the political attitude of disappointed progressives who are now looking elsewhere, in the extreme faith in digital and in the desire to dominate through technology. In reality very different, at least in terms of physical aggression. While Zuckerberg, a great admirer of the emperor Augustus and a lover of martial arts, has just won Jiu-Jitsu tournaments and faced the extreme physical challenges of the Murph Challenge, Musk, who claims to be zero in terms of athletic training, is used to stabbing his opponents with sarcasm (favorite target Jeff Bezos of Amazon).
June 22, 2023, 8:27 pm – edit June 22, 2023 | 8.30pm
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