The long-simmering feud between tech’s most prominent billionaires has reached a new boiling point, as Elon Musk and Telegram founder Pavel Durov launched a scathing attack on WhatsApp’s privacy credentials. The sparked row follows a US class-action lawsuit alleging that the Meta-owned platform has been intercepting private messages and sharing them with third parties, including the consulting giant Accenture, despite its public promise of "bulletproof" end-to-end encryption.
Musk was typically blunt in his assessment, posting on X that users simply "can’t trust WhatsApp." He seized the moment to promote his own platform’s messaging and calling features, claiming X Chat offers the "great benefit of actual privacy." Not to be outdone, Pavel Durov went even further, labelling WhatsApp’s encryption claims "the biggest consumer fraud in history" and accusing the app of deceiving billions of users while covertly harvesting their data.
Meta has moved quickly to dismiss the allegations as "categorically false and absurd." A spokesperson for the company defended their record, noting that WhatsApp has utilised the industry-standard Signal protocol for a decade. They maintain that the system ensures messages remain unreadable to anyone outside the specific conversation— including Meta itself.
The legal challenge, filed in a California federal court earlier this year, names Meta, WhatsApp, and Accenture as defendants. The plaintiffs argue that WhatsApp’s marketing — which famously insists "not even WhatsApp" can see your chats — is a misrepresentation. They are seeking a jury trial and a range of damages, claiming the interception of messages constitutes a profound breach of user trust.
The current spat is just another episode in the long-standing feud between Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Whether it was about the “cage fight” challenge that took the internet by storm in 2023 or the release of Threads, which is meant to compete with X, the two business tycoons seem not to miss a chance to poke fun at each other. Now that Musk is pushing Grok as an AI chatbot better than Meta’s artificial intelligence, the conflict over who will be kingpin in digital technology remains unresolved.
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