Business | A tale of two social networks

Twitter and Facebook have differing business models

And that makes for differing attitudes to politics

|SAN FRANCISCO

BIG EGOS butting heads has been a constant theme of the technology industry. When the personal computer was still young, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, a super-pragmatist, was pitted against Apple’s Steve Jobs, an extreme aesthete. In business software, a later duel was fought between Oracle’s Larry Ellison and SAP’s Hasso Plattner, who locked horns because they were so alike. The latest clash is in social media, between Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg—one a hands-off new-ager with a taste for fasting and ice baths, the other an absolutist ruler on a mission to bring the world closer together.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “A tale of two social networks”

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