The billionaire Twitter drama between Mark Cuban and Elon Musk is approaching a year with no signs of slowing down. Both men have repeatedly thrown jabs at each other on matters ranging from their differing views on DEI policies to their personal opinion of each other. Brace yourself — they get catty.
Elon began the year by responding to an ‘X’ user who accused Cuban of evading answering questions about Asian Americans fight against affirmative action and DEI initiatives. Musk replied to the poster calling Cuban a ‘virtue signaler.’
Mirroring his challenge to Mark Zuckerberg for a professional fight in August 2023, Elon challenged Cuban to a UFC-style cage fight to settle their differences on the merits of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
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In one of the DEI-related disputes, Musk posted that “The airline industry can’t find enough qualified pilots even without insane DEI requirements!”
Cuban responded with a link to an article that detailed the airline industry’s “multiple layers of merit-based evaluations,” countering the assertion that the gap was due to DEI-related limitations.
Musk replied calling out Cuban’s mental gymnastics.
The feud began began after Cuban did an interview where he claimed “Twitter has become just a cesspool for hate.” Illustrating his point, responses to the post include a string of anti-Semetic slurs and threats.
A clip of the interview was posted on X by rightwing ‘The Rabbit Hole.’ Musk responded with “Cuban gets Defiant L of the week award,” before responding to another X thread, critical of Cuban, with “Mark Cuban is an insufferable tool.” Cuban is tagged in the post Musk had responded to.
Cuban replied by quoting the lyrics to Doja Cat and Saweeti’s song ‘Bestfriend’. He ends it by claiming to love Elon back.
This interaction occurred after an X user posted a video of Mark speaking at a public event. The video caption claims Mark is desperate to be accepted because he asked his white listeners to be less defensive whenever discussions on race come up. Elon didn’t pass up the chance to troll.
Since Musk’s acquisition Twitter/X, he has championed the platform as the last bastion of free speech.
However, Cuban wasn’t having that. The Shark Tank personality pointed out that Musk controls how truths are amplified — or suppressed — on his platform in a recent interview with Jon Stewart.
“When you write an algorithm, you get to set the parameters of what you want to see happen” Cuban tells Stewart. “He certainly has done that to the things he likes.”
In response to the interview, Musk countered with the fact that X algorithm is open source unlike other platforms. He claims Cuban only sees what he searches for.
A few weeks later, Cuban clapped back — with receipts.
Cuban had run a poll asking X users “Who’s persona and character would you like to see young children grow up to have: Donald Trump or Kamala Harris?”
The results were overwhelmingly toward Trump, who got nearly 69% of the vote.
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But Cuban noticed something peculiar in the poll’s analytics — analytics that are measured and reported by X.
In a screenshot, Cuban points out that the poll had 804,000 responses, the post’s analytics only showed 656,000 total engagements. Cuban also posted a screenshot of X’s definitions for engagements, which included responding to a poll.
If responding to the poll counted as an engagement, how had 148,000 more people responded to the poll than had engaged with the post?
It seemed Cuban had caught Musk redhanded, inflating metrics for right-leaning responses.
The post’s comments are flooded with aggressive responses, calling Cuban a “communist,” “election denier,” while others ripped into Kamala Harris. All of these responses seemed to miss the point Cuban was making: According to X’s own analytics, 148,000 people had responded to the poll then had interacted with the post.
In response, Elon posted “The tenacity of his stupidity is a marvel to behold.” Notably however, Musk never addressed the clear analytical discrepancy Cuban pointed out. He has still not addressed the gap in numbers.
The billioniare Twitter drama is far from over. More recently, Cuban has expressed interest in buying both X and Fox News.
“If I had enough money to do it, which I don’t, I’d buy it in a heartbeat,” Cuban told Wired.
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