Elon Musk has reignited his long-running rivalry with Meta and its social-media platforms after posting that “Instagram is for girls” on X, drawing a fresh wave of reactions online.
X itself was acquired by xAI in a $33 billion deal announced in 2025, bringing Musk’s social-media and AI operations under the same corporate umbrella.
Musk made the remark on October 1 while responding to a post by venture capitalist Geiger Capital, which said it had “officially deleted Instagram ” and described the platform as an “inherently female app. Musk’s latest jab comes against the backdrop of a broader rivalry between his X platform and Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg . The rivalry has also expanded beyond social media. Musk’s xAI and Meta are competing in the artificial-intelligence sector, while Musk has increasingly integrated AI products such as Grok with his broader technology businesses.
The competition intensified in July 2023, when Meta launched Threads, a text-based social-media platform developed by the Instagram team. Meta described Threads as a service for sharing text updates and joining public conversations, with users able to sign in using their Instagram accounts. Threads’ close connection to Instagram gave Meta access to the platform’s enormous existing user base. Meta has since continued developing Threads independently, adding features including a web version, keyword search, trending topics and interoperability with parts of the ‘fediverse’. The latest exchange remains a social-media spat, but it adds another chapter to the years-long Musk-Meta rivalry that began with the battle between X and Threads and has since expanded into the broader competition over social media and artificial intelligence.
