The rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company, and Tesla founder Elon Musk is a long-standing one. When the question arises, who is the more impressive of the two, naturally the name Mask comes to mind.
Zuckerberg is the co-founder of Facebook, his mind is also innovative. Many call him a hoodie-wearing hobbyist, but that belies his skill and knowledge. While Elon Musk transformed Tesla into the world’s top electric car company and SpaceX into the world’s star rocket company, Zuckerberg never shared the fame and acclaim.
According to The Economist’s report, Mark Zuckerberg’s motto is to move forward and break everything, it may have been possible for Facebook to conquer the world by following this motto. But Facebook has also emerged as a social threat. But Elon Musk is respected as a rule breaker; He revels in his bad boy image and even gets by.
In this context, Elon Musk called Mark Zuckerberg to fight a duel in a closed cage in June last year. Then Meta Mask-owned Twitter-like short messaging app Threads launched. They never got into a physical fight, but from a business perspective, Musk was on top of Zuckerberg.
Elon Musk was once the richest person in the world. Tesla’s market value, on the other hand, has been lower than Meta’s lately, and its revenue growth rate has also been higher than Meta’s. Tesla’s performance over the past few years has become quite scary for investors. Elon Musk once received an annual salary of 5,600 million dollars. The court canceled his salary. As a result, Musk’s personal wealth has decreased. Again, from the United States to China, its electric car market has faced setbacks and even had to be withdrawn from the market.
In contrast, Mark Zuckerberg’s time is going pretty well. Meta’s earnings figures were released on February 1st this year, showing a huge increase in Meta’s sales and profits. Meta’s market capitalization has increased to 1.2 trillion or 120 billion dollars. Tesla’s market capitalization reached this level in 2021.
But not everything can be judged by short-term financial figures, long-term issues have to be looked at as well. For example, the way Zuckerberg is running his business, negotiating with shareholders or handling customers or dealing with his own failures, it is clear that he has won the battle.
To understand the reason for this, we have to look at how these two super rich manage their empire. The manner in which both of them establish control over their companies is not good at all in the eyes of corporate governance advocates. Zuckerberg now has majority control of Meta thanks to the dual share structure that Meta has. Elon Musk, on the other hand, practically controls the company’s employees directly. While Zuckerberg is sensitive about other shareholders, Musk is not. This has a major impact on their performance.
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Mark Zuckerberg’s mind started to change from 2022. Investors then complained that he was blowing money into projects like Metaverse. Meta’s core business was taking a beating. But Zuckerberg didn’t throw them away. He then focused on increasing profits by reducing the company’s costs. Investable money he invests in sectors like artificial intelligence. Apart from this, to show that investors’ money is not being wasted, Meta repurchases shares and returns money to investors and also announces that it will pay dividends to investors for the first time.
But that is not the case with Elon Musk. After Tesla’s share price reached its highest level in the past two years, the company appears to be racing to disappoint shareholders. Tesla is now selling expensive cars at a discount. Investors want Elon Musk to give Tesla more time. But Elon Musk is splitting his time between Tesla and SpaceX. While everyone is emphasizing AI and robotics, Elon Musk has countered that he will take AI and robotics out of Tesla if he is not given 25 percent voting power in Tesla.
Mark Zuckerberg is getting more mature with age, but Elon Musk is getting tougher with age. Here lies the difference between the two.
