The showdown between Threads and Twitter has at times looked like a bizarre personal rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, complete with a potential cage fight. However, Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino is now getting in on the act.
“Last week we had our largest usage day since February. There’s only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it,” Yaccarino posted on Twitter, late on Monday.
It’s a relatively rare intervention from Yaccarino, who started as CEO of Twitter last month with the mission of getting advertisers back on the social-media platform under Musk’s ownership. That effort risks being derailed by the success of
Meta Platforms
’ (ticker: META) new microblogging app Threads, which has surged to more than 100 million users in its first five days.
One group of people who might cheer Yaccarino’s statement are Tesla shareholders. Her appointment as Twitter CEO was greeted with optimism that it might help keep Musk’s focus on his role as head of
Tesla
and there could be some relief among investors in the electric-vehicle company if she begins to take a more public role in fighting off the challenge from Threads, reducing the potential for distraction.
Over the longer term, a successful Twitter fightback against Threads could reduce the chance Musk will resort again to selling Tesla stock to finance the social-media company. The stock sales weighed on Tesla investor sentiment for months.
Yaccarino’s post looks to be aimed at pushing back on suggestions that Threads is taking traffic from Twitter. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that third-party estimates indicated Twitter traffic had suffered in the first few days of Threads being fully available, as measured by visits to its websites and its web-domain ranking.
While Yaccarino didn’t offer details of how Twitter was measuring its usage, Musk responded to her tweet and said “cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime” was a key metric, adding the platform could hit an all-time record on that basis this week.
It might be possible to reconcile the contrasting figures. Musk has repeatedly claimed that Twitter is eliminating spam and bots from the platform, as well as limiting data scraping from the site. That could reduce individual traffic while driving up the proportion of genuinely engaged users. However, it’s hard to know without having clarity on the basis of Twitter’s traffic claims.
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Barron’s early on Tuesday.
Write to Adam Clark at [email protected]
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