to compete with Twitter, which is faced backlash under the ownership

of Elon Musk. The text based APP, known as threads looks nearly identical

to Twitter and has seen more than 30 million users sign up since

yesterday's launch. Mike Isaac is a technology reporter for The New

York Times, and he's been covering it all, Mike welcome. And thanks

for joining us 30 Million sign ups as of noon today was that to be

expected, or does that number surprise you? It's certainly surprised

me. It's even really surprised Mark Zuckerberg, who woke up this

morning and around eight AM posted 30 million, and last night he

was posting every couple of hours, basically as the numbers of users

ticked up, so I think even inside of Instagram, Facebook and Meta,

they're really surprised at how quickly people are embracing the

app. So I think you've been testing out the new app as as have I

many other people to. What do you think? How is threads going to

compete with Twitter? Yeah, I mean, the sort of simplicity of it

in that It is basically the exact same thing as Twitter. I think

really helps the product just because folks have been really upset

by a lot of the changes that Elon Musk has made to Twitter since

he bought it last year. And they basically wanted another Twitter

but not owned by Elon Musk, and this also lets you Import the graph

of people that you follow on instagram over to the new APP, which

basically makes it up, making it easy to get up and going right away.

Instead of having to follow a bunch of people right off the bat,

and the functionality is basically the same. Right. It's text based.

You have still have a scrolling feed. You can post videos and pictures

to But what about the timing, Mike? Why now? Why is Mark Zuckerberg?

Going into Twitter's territory right now. Sure, you know, Frankly,

I think it's because Mark since his weakness and there is weakness,

you know, since Ellen must took over Twitter has made a number of

strategic and business missteps. Last weekend over the long holiday

weekend, he took Twitter offline for a lot of people, and basically

the apps stopped working and You know, we were talking to the head

of Instagram yesterday and are reporting basically said that they

started developing the app inside of Meta last winter when they saw

that Twitter was really in tumult and Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg

intensely competitive, and they would they want to gain as much territory

as they can, and they saw that Twitter gave them an opportunity to

do so. So in terms of a response from Elon Musk, there's some reporting

that Twitter's threatening to now sue Meta over thread sending Zuckerberg

a cease and desist letter. We know musk has been Tweeting about this

this afternoon. He tweeted this saying competition is fine. Cheating

is not Mike. What is all this? Tell you about how Elon Musk views

this competitor. Yeah, he is not happy for sure. He, uh, has been

basically pushing back trying to get folks who are quote unquote,

scraping Twitter data or using it to build other apps and services

and I would take the threat of legal action Pretty real from him.

He likes going to court and using you know his advantage and having

billions of dollars to tangle things up in litigation is a real thing

that said he has a pretty formidable opponent in Meta and Facebook.

Look which is also got very deep pockets and is willing to go to

battle over this. As they said before that the suit they believe

is baseless. You cannot separate these apps from the men in charge.

You have two tech giants here in Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. They've

engaged as you mentioned in their own personal feud online, even

threatening to physically fight one another. How does all of this

competition factor into these business decisions right now?

No, You're exactly right. I think just as much as involved as there

is business strategy, But I do think that we're in a really interesting

and difficult time in social media. And there was an assumption for

a long time that Facebook kind of owned it all. But it feels more

up for grabs in a lot of ways. That probably wasn't true a few years

ago, so you see You know, Twitter, sort of on the ropes, medical,

creating new abs, different startups like you know, Blue Sky mastodon

spill. There's a bunch of different companies that feel like there's

an opportunity here and at the helm of almost all of these. You have

either the billionaires of the world controlling them or would be

entrants from little startups that feel like they can break in from

like, be real, which is another one. So everything feels very up

for grabs and up in the air and Way that that's pretty exciting and

hasn't been like this in a while. We'll see what happens next. That

is Mike Isaac Technology reporter from The New York Times joining

us tonight, Mike. Thank you. Good to see you. Thanks for having me.