Elon Musk Praises His Tech Rival Mark Zuckerberg in a Rare Rivalry Twist: "It is Impressive"

Elon Musk lauded his tech rival and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a tweet on his microblogging platform X (formerly known as Twitter). The CEO of Tesla is famously known for taking a dig at Zuckerberg according to NPR for "unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property" after Meta launched Threads came forward to laud his rival's contribution to AI.

Recently Musk praised the Facebook creator on Meta's latest AI model Llama 3.1. Andrej Karpathy, the former director of Tesla AI, tweeted congratulating the techie writing, "Huge congrats to @AIatMeta on the Llama 3.1 release!" as he noted the new features in the post. Musk responded to Karpathy's post, stating, "It is impressive, and Zuck does deserve credit for open-sourcing." The congratulatory comment came after Llama 3.1 reportedly outperformed OpenAI's GPT-4 according to Engadget. 

Several took to X to share their awe at the SpaceX CEO's comment after his previous threat of a legal lawsuit against Zuckerberg for "copying" Twitter. He infamously threw shade on his rival saying, "Competition is fine, cheating is not." @Jeremilemagne commented, "Strange to see Musk & Zuck come to similar conclusions, but refreshing." Another user, @ControlChaos999 asked, "So does that mean an Elon/Zuck cage match is off the table?"

@patelchief anticipated as he wrote, "Slowly but surely…. You are taking Mark Zuckerberg under your wings Good to see the transformation… " @philipgura on the other hand wrote, "Funny that @Meta is doing what @OpenAI was designed to do." @Tina46001705 wrote, "Indeed. There is always hope for tech giants to come together and collaborate for the betterment of life for all." Supporting a similar claim @as_cybersamurai wrote, "xAI and Meta can strive towards making open-source AI the industry standard." However, the appreciation does not end their tech rivalry as they continue to develop new models of AI.

On Independence Day when Zuckerberg posted a video of himself wakeboarding with a flag of the US in his hand and a drink in the other. Musk commented, "May he continue to have fun on his yachts. I prefer to work." The video captioned, "Happy birthday, America! 🇺🇸" plays Bruce Springsteen's track Born In The USA while Zuckerberg surfs through the waves. Previously, Musk challenged Zuckerberg for a cage fight after users warned him of the latter's jiu-jitsu training. TMZ also reported that the Italian government had also offered the heritage site Colosseum.

The Italian Culture Ministry clarified, "If Zuckerberg and Musk wanted to perform in the Colosseum they would have to make a non-violent challenge." Musk had also tweeted hinting at a welcoming remark saying, "Some chance fight happens in Colosseum." The tech moguls have constantly been in the news for bashing each other and making bizarre statements. Amid all of it, an appreciation comment has left several baffled and surprised.