- Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said he deleted his Instagram account in a post on X.
- He also said he does not have Whatsapp or Facebook and is going "Meta free."
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey seems to have taken a side in Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's fight, saying he had abandoned Instagram and gone "Meta free."
"Deleted my instagram account after 12 years. was one of the first 10 accounts I believe, and one of the first angel investors," Dorsey wrote in a post on Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) on August 18.
"Who will they give the @jack handle to?" Dorsey continued in the post, and appeared to diss some of Meta's other platforms, too.
He went on to say that did not have Facebook or WhatsApp accounts either. "Clear eyes, meta free, can't lose," he wrote.
Dorsey had previously said he didn't use any Meta products, saying he and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg had "different approaches" when asked if they had "beef" on a 2020 podcast.
When another commenter, who, according to his bio works in analytics at X, asked Dorsey to give "reasons" for deleting Instagram, he replied saying, "All the reasons are too meta to be interesting."
Dorsey's announcement caught the eye of Musk himself, who responded with a single fire emoji, prompting replies from some commenters speculating whether Dorsey would be keeping his profile on X.
Dorsey stepped down as Twitter's CEO in 2021, and in October 2022, Elon Musk acquired the platform. Musk's handling of the company has come under intense scrutiny. Dorsey, who co-founded the X rival app Bluesky, appeared to express sympathy for Musk in a post on X from early July where he said that "running Twitter is hard."
On July 5, Meta launched Threads, a Twitter rival, sparking up an online feud between Zuckerberg and Musk which has resulted in ongoing rumors about a possible cage match between the two tech giants.
Dorsey has seemingly poked jabs at Zuckerberg's Threads in previous posts on X. On July 4, he appeared to criticize Meta's handling of user privacy by sharing a screenshot of data the app collects from users, and on July 16, he shared a screenshot that purportedly showed that Zuckerberg had requested to follow him on Threads, responding, "Too soon b."
The source of Dorsey's ire with Meta likely goes back to a battle over social platforms. According to the 2020 book "No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram" by Bloomberg tech journalist Sarah Frier, Dorsey was involved in Instagram's early days, investing before it was even called Instagram, and was looking to purchase the company. Dorsey told Vanity Fair in 2013 he was "heartbroken" when he learned that Facebook had acquired Instagram under Twitter's nose.
Dorsey has a long history of jabbing at Zuckerberg. In 2019, when Facebook came under fire for not fact-checking political ads, Dorsey said that Twitter would stop all political advertising and criticized Zuckerberg's free speech argument. He also mocked Zuckerberg's plans to rebrand Facebook into an all-caps logo, and his Metaverse plan.