Tech titans? Musk and Zuckerberg’s feud is an ultra-public toddler tantrum
From threats for a real life fight to launching rival to Twitter, the bizarre blood feud between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk shows how far our entrepreneurs have fallen, writes Josh Williams.
If this is supposed to be the age of giant technology entrepreneurs, how very small they look. In recent weeks, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have been publicly and pathetically measuring themselves against the other. Both have come up short.
It all began, ludicrously, with the sight of these two overgrown boys declaring they would fight each other in a cage. Zuckerberg has recently been attempting to transform from high-school nerd to frat-house bro. If you care to see some evidence, witness his transformation photo, recently posted to his Instagram account: from the neck down, he is all muscle. Alas, the effort seems to have drained everything above. All that is left is a gawping mouth and a rigid, dead-eyed stare. At least Musk had humour enough to admit his only known form of exercise is lifting one of his many children.
This was just the prelude. Once they stopped fighting on social media, they started fighting about it instead. Last week, Zuckerberg’s Meta launched a new social media platform that bears a striking resemblance to Twitter, currently owned and mismanaged by Musk.
‘Threads’, Zuckerberg’s new platform, has already drawn over 100 million users, though what it intends to add to the sum of human happiness is unclear. Zuckerberg has claimed he plans to make his social network more “friendly” than Twitter. It should be noted that this comes from a man who launched his first social network in order to rank the attractiveness of women in his university. These two men – who are of undoubted talent – are wasting their time competing to create something that will only waste yet more of ours.
There was a time when spats between entrepreneurs meant more than this. When Elon Musk founded Tesla, he looked backwards in order to look forward, naming his company in honour of Nikola Tesla, the visionary Serbian-American inventor of the late nineteenth and early 20th century.
If Tesla is not universally hailed as the greatest inventor of his age, it is only because he was locked in his own bitter rivalry – engaged in a long-running patent-race with Thomas Edison, his former employer.
To see how spats are really fought, Zuckerberg and Musk could cast their minds to the great “war of the currents” played out between these two.
In the 1880s, the race was on to provide electric lighting to America. Edison had the initial advantage: his “direct current” technology was already inside people’s homes. Tesla’s new “alternating current” – newer and more powerful, but also less easily controlled – now lit their streets.
In some ways, their fight was far dirtier than Musk and Zuckerberg’s today. Threatened by his new competitor, there was no low that Edison would not stoop to. He sent long pamphlets to newspaper editors, setting out the dangers of his rival’s technology. To convince the public of his cause, his firm publicly electrocuted animals with an alternating current, killing them in front of watching crowds. Perhaps most deviously of all, he even conspired to ensure that it was Tesla’s technology that powered the first ever electric chair.
While the tricks were certainly dirty, however, the goals they served were lofty. The turn of the twentieth-century was, as the title of a recent fictionalised version of the feud put it, The Last Days of the Night. Mark Zuckerberg should need little reminding of that. Asked to name his “book of the summer” four years ago, it was the novel he chose.
Zuckerberg and Musk clearly see themselves as successors to that great entrepreneurial age. The two men are indeed impressive. From nothing, Zuckerberg built a business that was recently valued at over $1tn. That is more than the gross domestic product of all but 17 countries in the world. Musk, meanwhile, has built companies that have transformed industries, not least the electric car company that bears his forebear’s name and the satellite system that has allowed Ukranians to fight on.
Competition is the vital lifeblood of progress. Individuals – per Thomas Carlyle’s “great man theory”, which argued that great leaders are born, not made – can indeed shape the world. But when they engage in petty squabbles and devote their time and resources to foolish projects, they bring us no closer to the light.
£ Josh Williams is deputy director of Labour Together
Even if the pandemic hadn’t happened, we would have all ended up working remotely
WORKING from home is a phenomenon we still associate with the pandemic. Some companies are trying to reverse its growth and get more people back into the office, but the debate about productivity has failed, so far, to yield conclusive results.
A fascinating and timely Stanford research paper, entitled “The evolution of working from home”, provides both a wider picture and some powerful insights. The authors, Nick Bloom of the Stanford economics department and Steven Davies of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, are distinguished scholars.
The opening sentence tells an important story: “Working from home has been rising in the US for many decades, driven by the continuing improvements in technology that enables remote working”.
In the 1960s, only 0.4 per cent of full paid days in America were done from home, basically in craft-based activities. By the 1990s, this had more than doubled to 1 per cent, driven by the spread of the personal computer. In the mid-2010s, the technology has improved and this percentage quadrupled, to 4 per cent.
So even before the pandemic, the data show a rapidly rising trend. The percentage working from home, whilst still small, doubled in three decades and quadrupled in just two. This type of growth is associated with technologies which are now ubiquitous.
Sure, there was a massive surge in the percentage of days worked from home when the pandemic first struck. Many who couldn’t work remotely, simply didn’t work. Bloom and Davies show, using two independent data sources, that by the summer of 2023 this has stabilised at around 25 per cent.
This was of course facilitated by improvements in technology which already existed. For example, video-call software like Teams and Zoom, cloud file-sharing packages such as Dropbox, and connectivity software like Gmail and Slack.
The authors note that, whilst obtaining high quality data across many countries is challenging, Northern Europe has shown a similar pattern to the US. They identify three groups of workers. The largest, which tends to be lower paid, cannot do their jobs from home. Hybrid workers are about 30 per cent of the workforce, and the smallest is those who work completely from home.
Fully remote work is associated with a productivity level between 10 and 20 per cent below fully in-person work. But with hybrid working, it is hard to identify any difference at all, although if anything it is very slightly positive.
Survey data shows that employees value the ability to work from home two or three days a week as being worth on average 8 per cent of their salary. Intriguingly, Bloom and Davies present evidence that this is being translated into actual pay. Many more graduates work from home than non-graduates, and overall graduate pay in the US relative to non-graduates has fallen by about 10 per cent since the start of the pandemic.
Like it or not, working from home is a phenomenon which is not just here to stay, but the actual quantity of work which can be done from home will rise. This prediction is based, in part, on growth before the pandemic, but also the speed at which technology has accelerated. In many ways, the pandemic compressed the growth over a decade or slightly more into the space of a couple of years. In the 2030s, up to 40 per cent of all working days will be done from home.