Elon Musk thrilled as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey quits Meta’s Instagram

“Deleted my Instagram account after 12 years, was one of the first 10 accounts I believe, and one of the first angel investors. who will they give the @jack handle to?,” he wrote.

In reply to a user, Dorsey admitted that he did not have a Facebook or WhatsApp account either, adding “clear eyes, meta free, can’t lose.”

After Dorsey’s tweet Musk responded with a fire emoji.

On another decentralised platform, Nostr, Dorsey revealed that he had stopped using Instagram years ago, when it was sold to Facebook (now Meta). Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom was an intern at Odeo, an organisation established in 2005 by Noah Glass and Evan Williams. Later rebranded as the Obvious Corporation, it ended up becoming the birthplace of Twitter.

Dorsey and Systrom were friends since they worked at Odeo together. At one point, Twitter even tried to buy Instagram, but its bid was rejected.

When Dorsey later found out that the photo-sharing platform was sold to Facebook for $1 billion, he stopped posting on it. He was hurt that Systrom didn’t tell him directly, as revealed by author Sarah Frier in her book “No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram.”

Dorsey’s deletion of his Instagram handle gains ever more significance in the ongoing feud between X and Meta. In July, Meta launched its new platform Threads, which allowed users to share text updates and join conversations. Dorsey had called the app a “Twitter clone” in a message.

Elon Musk had challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a ‘cage fight’ earlier. After a lot of back-and-forth on social media, the anticipated clash was called off, with both tech chiefs giving the impression that the other had backed out.

As for Jack Dorsey, he has retained a stake in X. But, the tech entrepreneur has sometimes supported the microblogging platform’s rivals. He helped the app Bluesky get off the ground, having incubated the project when he was Twitter’s CEO. Dorsey has also backed another decentralised networking protocol Nostr by donating almost $2,45,000 in bitcoin.