Musk versus Zuckerberg at the Octagon

Mark Zuckerberg is the overwhelming favorite to beat Elon Musk in a cage match.

Will it actually happen? Potentially, but not before Zuckerberg releases his Twitter competitor next month. I have more details on all that, plus takeaways from Figma’s annual Config conference — the Coachella for product designers — in downtown San Francisco this week.

A reminder that I want to hear your feedback, including who you think would win the cage match. Also: sharing is caring, so feel free to forward this to a friend or colleague.

Is this for real?

I’ve been hearing a version of that question a lot since I reported that Mark Zuckerberg is indeed ready to fight Elon Musk in a cage match. Could there be anything more entertaining than two of the richest and most famous CEOs in the world throwing hands?

“I’ve been waiting for these physical battles in tech,” Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told Dave Lee from Bloomberg this week. “Actually, I will challenge any leader in tech to bench press.” (No one take him up on this, please — one tech billionaire-on-billionaire fight is enough for now.)

In terms of Musk and Zuckerberg actually fighting, both sides seemingly want it to happen, at least for now. But there are still plenty of ways it can easily fall apart.

Here’s what I do know: thanks to Zuckerberg, who was channeling his inner Khabib Nurmagomedov with that “send me location” post, UFC president Dana White is now mediating between the two billionaires. White has suggested that proceeds from the fight would go to charity, though that sounds like putting the cart before the horse at this point.

Physically, Zuckerberg has obvious advantages in being more than 10 years younger than Musk and a trained fighter. He claims to have recently completed the “Murphy Challenge” in just under 40 minutes — a time so impressive that it had people doubting his truthfulness. Elon “The Walrus” Musk, meanwhile, has a sizable weight and height advantage that shouldn’t be discounted.

With White now involved, my understanding is that the next phase is figuring out a mutually agreed-upon weight class. If that’s decided on, I expect that Zuckerberg would agree to bulk up to help close the gap. It’s unclear, however, if Musk would be willing to lose weight or if he’d use the stipulation as a way to back out.

Musk has said he wants the fight to be “full MMA,” though his mother, Maye Musk, is tweeting up a storm in protest. If the fight doesn’t fall apart over the weight class, Musk could certainly blame his concerned mother or just make something up. (He does, after all, have a history of trying to back out of things.) Zuckerberg, however, is all in.

Regardless of what happens, it’s clear that the UFC is seeing dollar signs right now. “The biggest fight of all time was Floyd and Conor. I just think it triples that,” White told TMZ yesterday. “There’s no limit on what that thing can make.”

Now for an update on why Musk and Zuckerberg are wanting to fight in the first place: Meta is gearing up to release its Twitter competitor very soon, I’m told. The new, text-based app, dubbed Project 92 internally and potentially Threads externally, is currently planned to come out in mid-July, according to people familiar with the plan.

Meta has been courting big-name celebrities and creators to join, pitching them on a platform that will be “sanely” run. (That comment is what first tweaked Musk to suggest that he and Zuckerberg fight.) The app is going to be promoted inside Instagram, giving it a massive source of distribution on day one, and people will be able to auto-fill it with their Instagram account info to quickly get started. This isn’t some side project; Meta is hoping for at least tens of millions of users within the first few months of availability.

Here’s the interesting catch: The app will hook into ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol that also powers Mastodon, but not at first. Instead, Meta plans to introduce this phase about three months after the initial release. When the switch is flipped, users will be shown a prompt explaining the benefits of the app moving onto the protocol.

Now, if you aren’t in the weeds on this stuff like I am, your eyes probably just glazed over. The simplest way I can explain ActivityPub, or the Fediverse as it’s also called, is to think of social media as if it operated more like email. So instead of one company controlling everything, you can take your information to different service providers. Meta and all its users will be but one “server” on ActivityPub that can talk to people who host their content on other servers.

The whole idea for ActivityPub is that one company shouldn’t be in charge of the platform that people use to communicate. That makes Meta — the biggest social media company in the world — entering the space quite awkward.

In addition to using Instagram as a jumping-off point, Meta’s upcoming Twitter competitor will be able to import existing account info and posts from other ActivityPub servers, meaning someone could, say, move all of their content from Mastodon into Meta’s app. Importantly, posts hosted and visible on Meta’s server will be subject to Facebook’s content moderation rules, which means those policies will likely have a sweeping impact across the Fediverse.

Employees from Meta have been meeting with leaders from large ActivityPub servers recently, including Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko, to discuss the plan under NDA ahead of the app’s release. Meta knows it’s treading on thin ice with the power users of ActivityPub who are already incredibly wary of its motives. The company is planning to create a roundtable for administrators of other servers and developers to share best practices and work through problems that will inevitably arise, like Meta’s server traffic putting strain on other, smaller servers. (A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on all this.)

“I think they want to handle things fairly well going in, but it’s Meta,” one ActivityPub leader told me. “You can’t really trust their intentions given their track record.”

Figma hosted its annual Config conference this week, drawing over 8,000 product designers and developers from around the world to downtown San Francisco. With all the recent talk of San Fransisco being dead as a city, it felt strangely alive around the Moscone Center this week. The Starbucks next door even ran out of oat milk. “Used to go to Coachella now we go to config,” tweeted one attendee.

With guest speakers like Brian Chesky, Bret Taylor, and Reid Hoffman this year, Figma feels hotter than ever, even as its proposed $20 billion sale to Adobe hangs in the balance. Figma’s fans — and I do mean fans: people literally get Figma tattoos — initially revolted at the idea of the startup being acquired by Adobe, though the mood seems to have shifted this year. When CEO Dylan Field acknowledged the still-pending deal onstage, there were some actual claps from the audience.

After walking through the packed halls at Moscone this week, it’s easy to see why Adobe was willing to pay an absurd multiple for Figma. This year’s Config was more than eight times larger than the last in-person conference Figma held in 2020. It’s iterating rapidly on products, releasing a new “dev mode” this week that it thinks will attract more developers to the platform.

Toward the end of day two of Config, I caught up with Figma chief product officer Yuhki Yamashita to ask about his takeaways from this year’s conference, how Figma is thinking about generative AI, the Adobe deal, and more. Below are some edited excerpts from our conversation:

What has been the main takeaway for you this year?

Well, first, I think everyone has missed being together in person. There just haven’t been these kinds of community events that bring designers closer together, and I think designers really love community.

It was really shocking to me, actually, that some of the most attended sessions were just the trainings [for Figma’s new features].

On releasing dev mode and what it signals about the company’s broader product expansion plans:

How do you go from an idea to a product in the user’s hands? Anything that we can do in that process to make that faster, more efficient, more fun, those are things that we’re thinking about.

How Figma thinks about generative AI:

There’s the large language models, and then there’s the diffusion models. We’re more in the former because, at the end of the day, even though our designs look visual, underlying, it’s more like code. It’s like XML, basically. And because it’s highly structured, actually, it matters, for example, that this rectangle is inside this other rectangle. At the end of the day, it translates into code.

So it’s actually more code-like than the pixels that you see in diffusion models. So from that perspective, I think our aspiration might be similar to GitHub Copilot, as opposed to some of the other things that you see out there.

Why Figma has such a passionate user base:

Our dialog with the community helps make the product better. Dylan reads every tweet about Figma, which, you know, some of us say is unhealthy. But at the end of the day, he just wants the pulse on what people are saying. And we want the community to know that they’re just as much steering the direction as we are, in a sense. And so I think that has built a lot of this loyalty over time.

In the beginning, there was a small group of people who really believed in our mission and had to fight for that idea that more people should be inside a design file because that was an unpopular decision at the time. And I think that built this camaraderie, or this philosophy, that has ballooned into what Figma is about. So Figma is not just a tool. It’s a movement for how design is changing and evolving. And I think people are identifying with that as well.

On the reactions to selling to Adobe:

When the news first came out, people just had their assumptions around what it means. Like, “Is Figma going to change now?”

We’ve always been listening to the community, but we [realized] we really need to be paying attention to the community right now because we want them to know that we’re going to continue to listen to them, and nothing’s going to change about that. And I hope that they feel that way.

Adobe has been doing some amazing things around designs and has been very thoughtful, especially around AI and design and thinking about the role of the designer, and has been a thought leader in that way. I think that has been really great for them in terms of winning the community’s trust.

I’m excited to interview Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki at this year’s Code Conference in late September. My friends Nilay Patel, Casey Newton, and Julia Boorstin will be hosting at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel. Applications for tickets are now open. I hope to see you there.

I’ll be back next week. Thanks for subscribing, and have a good weekend.