This week, the battle between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk reached a new level that didn’t require the two tech moguls to face off in a cage match.

Meta Platforms Inc. launched Threads, a microblogging and messaging app linked to Instagram. That drew the ire of Musk and Twitter Inc., which threatened legal action. Its lawyer, Alex Spiro, wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg that his company was engaged in “systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” after hiring dozens of former Twitter employees.

Threads passed 70 million signups as of Friday, making the launch of the social network the top story in tech right now, according to theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier (pictured, left).

“They avoided the cold start problem that everyone’s been talking about,” Furrier said on the latest episode of theCUBE podcast. “Every app knows it’s hard. Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky just has 300,000 downloads since June 30. Wow, what a big number. Three days in, Zuckerberg got 70 million downloads.”

Is Twitter too big to die?

One of the hurdles facing Bluesky right now is the fact that the app remains invite-only. That’s not a problem for Threads, which is tied into a user’s Instagram account and pulls from follow lists that already exist, according to theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante (right).

“Threads is fine. It’s good. I mean, wow, all the downloads. Maybe that’s sort of the newness of it, the novelty of it,” Vellante said. “I think it’s OK, but it’s basically Instagram as well. I like Instagram better than Threads so far. I still like Twitter.”

At this point, Twitter may be “too big to die,” but if it were to die, it would be due to it being accused of being the “new Parler,” according to Furrier. That, of course, raises the question of whether people think that Zuckerberg will save everyone from Twitter, according to Vellante.

“It’s like, really? We’re going to trust this guy with our privacy?” he stated. “Meta’s track record on privacy and governance — I mean, just look at the corporate structure. It’s abysmal.”

Still, the new platform has a good look and feel, in Vellante’s view. From a tech standpoint, it also seemed to be well done, but it’s “typical” that if you want to delete your Threads account, you must also delete your Instagram account, according to Vellante.

“I wouldn’t want to delete my Instagram account. I like my Instagram. But, I just think I’m going to kind of be in wait-and-see mode. I’ll float a few comments and respond maybe more to other people’s stuff,” he said. “Twitter’s still my primary for my opinions and my thoughts, and LinkedIn too.”

Supercloud 3 is fast approaching

It’s been fast and furious for theCUBE’s event coverage, with no plans to slow down anytime soon. Coming up from July 18 to 19 is Supercloud 3 from theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studios in Palo Alto.

There have been some themes that have been emerging out of prerecords already when it comes to the focus on cross-cloud security and the impact of generative artificial intelligence, according to Vellante.

“The consensus is, and not a lot of people will talk about this, but if you can get them talking in private, you can get them to sort of admit that, initially, the technology community had the advantage here because they had all the AI tech,” he said. “Not that the adversaries didn’t have access to AI tech, they did; but it wasn’t as prevalent as it is post-ChatGPT.”

The tech vendors and defenders had the advantage, but it has now flipped, with adversaries seemingly now with the advantage, according to Vellante.

“We’re going to keep probing on that. And Supercloud is just an awesome community event to gather people,” Vellante said.

Tech experts are starting to use supercloud as a verb these days, in terms of identifying a supercloud layer, indicating the start of a cultural shift, according to Furrier. Looking back at 2023 may be when people recognized that the supercloud really emerged, he added.

“You look at virtual machines, for instance … VMworld, is an event that’s now happened over and over again. Now it’s called VMware Explore. They’ve just gotten bought by Broadcom,” he said. “You’re going to see that entire generation of IT ops, practitioners evolve and get re-skilled into cloud operations.”

Watch the full theCUBE Podcast below to find out why these industry pros were also mentioned:

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and CTO of Twitter

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms

Matt Garman, SVP of AWS sales and marketing at Amazon

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon.com

Jack Dorsey, founder of Block

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram

Sheryl Sandberg, Chairperson, LeanIn.org

Howard Lindzon, co-founder and chairman of StockTwits

Stu Miniman, director of market insights for hybrid platforms at Red Hat

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies

Taylor Lorenz, tech journalist

Kara Swisher, tech journalist and podcast host

Alex Stamos, partner at Krebs Stamos Group

Charles Fitzgerald, consultative strategist and investor

Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks

Matei Zaharia, co-founder and CTO at Databricks

Naveen Rao, co-founder and CEO of MosaicML

Benoit Dageville, president of product and co-founder of Snowflake

Christian Kleinerman, SVP of product at Snowflake

Sanjeev Mohan, principal at SanjMo

Jeetu Patel, EVP and GM for security and collaboration business units at Cisco

Sarbjeet Johal, technology analyst and principal research officer

Jeff Denworth, co-founder of Vast Data

Renen Hallak, founder and CEO of Vast Data

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare

George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike

Phil Venables, CISO of Google Cloud and VP at Google

Mario Duarte, VP of security at Snowflake

Doug Merritt, chairman, president and CEO of Aviatrix Systems

Tom Gillis, SVP/GM of Cisco

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Photo: SiliconANGLE