Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don’t get on well with each other. The Twitter CEO and Facebook founder have publicly quarreled over the advances in artificial intelligence in the past. Now Musk is shooting at Zuckerberg again, this time it’s about data protection and party donations.
It all started with a tweet: On Monday, Musk tweeted an article written in 2021 by “The Federalist”, a right-wing online magazine. The report claims Zuckerberg has the US Presidential Election 2020 through donations of $400 million “bought”.
Zuckerberg had already commented on these allegations immediately after the presidential election. Although he did make donations to non-profit organizations and local polling stations, he never favored any particular party.
However, The Federalist is pumping the money into an overstated, far-right one conspiracy theory on, with the basic tenor that the democratic Joe Biden only became president thanks to the Meta CEO.
Musk: “You can’t trust WhatsApp”
Musk called the report “interesting” and commented on Zuckerberg: “It seems like he is extremely partisan.” On Tuesday, the Twitter CEO followed up, this time criticizing the Meta-owned WhatsApp.
He retweeted a post from a Twitter employee who claims WhatsApp has used the microphone turned on his cell phone while he slept.
Musk commented on his employee’s tweet with the words: “WhatsApp can not be trusted”. WhatsApp sea there was a high probability that a defect was responsible for the activity of the microphone.
“We believe that it is a mistake Android is misattributing information in the privacy dashboard and have asked Google to investigate and fix this,” the company said. WhatsApp typically only uses a phone’s microphone when users make a call or send a voice message.
Long-standing feud
Musk has been increasingly critical of Zuckerberg in recent years. At a TED-Talk in 2022, for example, he criticized Meta for owning several giant social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. He even compared Zuckerberg to King Louis XIVa long-reigning French monarch with enormous powers.
A few years earlier criticized in turn, the negative attitude of the Tesla CEO to Zuckerberg TO and called it “irresponsible”. Musk promptly fired back, tweeting that Zuckerberg “only has one limited understanding from this topic”.
