Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, carved out some time to throw some shade toward Mark Zuckerberg during a recent appearance on a podcast, saying that Zuckerberg’s new platform Threads seems to be pretty desolate in terms of engagement.
Musk, who also founded Tesla, appeared on episode 2054 of "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast, discussing a variety of topics such as why he acquired Twitter, his highly anticipated Cybertruck, Meta’s Threads and more.
During the podcast, host Joe Rogan called Threads a “ghost town,” and Musk responded saying "yeah, it's eerily quiet." Musk even took shots at Zuckerberg’s lack of posts on the platform.
"I mean, Zuck himself doesn't post," he said. "You got to use your own product."
Related: Threads threatens X with upcoming competitive feature
A quick look at Zuckerberg's profile on Threads shows that he engages on the platform almost daily compared to Musk who tweets almost every few hours.
Musk’s comments come amid reports that X is on the decline. X’s web traffic is down by 14% in September compared to the same time last year, which was before he made changes to the platform, according to data from Similarweb, a company that specializes in web analytics. Mobile usage of the app was also down by 17.8% this September which is based on monthly active users for iOS and Android combined in the U.S.
Since Zuckerberg launched Threads in July this year as a competitive clone of X, the app has also faced its own headwinds. Threads’ daily active users on its Android app declined by 79%, a month after its launch in July, according to Similarweb, after the app peaked at 49.3 million daily active users worldwide on July 7.
Insider Intelligence recently predicted that Threads will have 23.7 million active monthly users in the U.S. by the end of this year compared to X, which is estimated to have 56.1 million active monthly users by the end of 2023.
Despite a decline in user engagement, Zuckerberg recently expressed optimism about the future of Threads becoming a more positive space during Meta’s earnings call last week.
“I’ve thought for a long time there should be a billion-person public conversations app that is a bit more positive,” said Zuckerberg. “I think that if we keep at this for a few more years, then I think we have a good chance of achieving our vision there.”
