Here's an idea for Twitter, Elon: Copycat your way to a $630 billion empire just as Mark Zuckerberg did

• Here's an idea for Elon Musk: try copying ideas from other social-media apps for Twitter.
• Being a copycat has allowed Mark Zuckerberg to turn Meta into a social-media juggernaut.

Mark Zuckerberg is up to his old tricks again as he gets ready to take on Elon Musk in the most flagrant way yet. In other words, he's back to copycatting.

The Meta chief has drawn up plans for Instagram to introduce a Twitter competitor that would allow users to share text, per reports last week. Zuckerberg is reportedly already going out of his way to get high-profile influencers onboard.

This is not the first time Zuckerberg has taken a leaf out of his rivals' books. In the span of almost two decades, he has been able to create – and keep intact – his $630 billion social-media empire by copying ideas from plucky upstarts building competing social networks.

Musk's new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino seems ready for the challenge from Zuckerberg, but if she and Musk are really serious about turning Twitter into a money-making machine, they may need to do some brazen copycatting of their own.

How copycatting has worked in Zuckerberg's favor

Zuckerberg's timing in creating a Twitter clone is apparent, as the turmoil the company's faced since Musk's buyout has created an opportunity for others to present an alternative to disgruntled users.

The emergence of several rival Twitter services, including Substack Notes, Mastodon and the Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky, shows several companies have spotted this opportunity. But this is far from the first time Zuckerberg has attempted to copy a rival.

Perhaps most famously, Facebook, as Meta was previously known, started to borrow ideas from Snapchat after Zuckerberg tried and failed to buy the company in 2016 following a failed $3 billion acquisition attempt three years prior.

First came Facebook's acquisition of MSQRD, an app that let people add fun filters to their photos and videos in much the same way that Snapchat did. Then came the introduction of the "Stories" format to Instagram, which had given Snapchat its unique selling point for so long.

More recently, Meta has been alert to the threat of TikTok, which has pushed Zuckerberg's employees to implement design changes to Facebook and Instagram that make them more like the viral video app.

Last year, Meta announced that videos under 15 minutes would be converted into TikTok-like Reels, for instance, while Facebook would have a new "Home" tab that recommended content based on its understanding of a user's taste and interests – much like TikTok.

Eyebrows were raised further when Instagram announced a paid subscription service that looked a lot like the Twitter Blue subscription introduced by Musk. It encourages users to pay a monthly fee for verification.

Why Twitter should become a copycat

Emails from 2012 showed that Zuckerberg's chief concern in Facebook's growth years was that other apps were moving faster than his own. It helps explain why he was so unashamed of his copycatting in the years that followed.

Musk's success at Twitter may now rest on his ability to do the same. The $44 billion price tag he paid for the platform pales in comparison with Meta's $630 billion market capitalization, which is 14 times its size, and TikTok parent company ByteDance's reported private valuation of $220 billion.

That means Musk will need to deploy every trick in the book to build Twitter to the kind of size and status of its rivals.

There is some evidence that Musk is ready to borrow from others, having made his intentions clear to turn Twitter into an "everything app" that resembles the kind of super apps like WeChat that dominate Asia.

With more than 1 billion monthly active users, WeChat clearly offers something to its users that keeps them coming back. Ideally, Musk would want Twitter to offer the same by giving users features they don't get on the app.

In theory, that could mean Twitter users could use the app to make payments, watch entertainment, book tickets, among other things.

Given the rise of video-first apps, Musk could borrow ideas about video from the likes of TikTok and Instagram. Twitter is allowing longer videos onto its site now, though shorter videos are in vogue. To this day, users mourn the death of Twitter's former short video service Vine.

We will likely get a clearer view on Twitter's direction in the coming months once Yaccarino settles into her job. Just don't be surprised if her shakeup of the company feels extremely familiar.