Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri Explains Why They’re Challenging Elon Musk

The launch of Threads comes at a perfect time, coinciding with Elon Musk’s recent announcement to limit the number of tweets viewed per day, a decision that was quickly reversed due to public backlash. This decision led to a surge in users on alternative platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky. It is possible that Threads wanted to capitalize on this trend by launching earlier than planned, but there is a deeper reason behind its creation. Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta-owned Instagram, has disclosed the motivation behind Threads and why they are taking on Elon Musk’s social media platform.

In an interview with The Verge, Mosseri said, “Obviously, Twitter was the pioneer of the space, and there are a lot of good offerings for public conversations. But given everything that was going on, we thought we had an opportunity to build something open and something that was already good for Instagram for the using community.

Twitter vs Threads: The Battle of Social Media

While the tweet limit came as a great opportunity, the creation of Threads was planned months ahead, probably at a time when Musk and Twitter were still embroiled in lawsuits. Many thought that when a billionaire took control of a social media platform, things could get very murky — and they did.

Decision-making under Musk has been chaotic, with layoffs of current high-level employees, mass layoffs, changing the nature of the blue tick, and a heavy push for subscriptions while alienating advertisers. and sometimes questionable.

And maybe this is where other platforms like Bluesky, Mastodon and even Instagram’s Threads opened up.

Mosseri explained, “I think there’s a lot more noise on Twitter than there was. Just the volatility and unpredictability of what’s going on there seemed like it could provide an opportunity. If things like stability started to become an issue, or if they changed the product too radically, they were things that might leave us a gap in a space that otherwise looked quite difficult to compete with.

But at the same time, he admits that building a new social media is not easy. “I want to be clear: whenever you build a new app from scratch, it’s much less likely to succeed. So this is still a risky venture, but it just seemed like the landscape was changing. People were interested in alternative options to have public discussions. Of course, we’re not just playing in the space beyond Twitter,” he added.