“Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday, taking a dig at tech giant Apple for lack of innovation. He was with renowned podcaster and UFC commentator Joe Rogan on his podcast show where he criticized the $3.3749 trillion company (according to Forbes in December). Per Zuckerberg, Apple has lost the art of inventing new products after launching the iPhone in 2007. But things have taken a wild turn after Reddit co-founder and Serena Williams’ husband, Alexis Ohanian, decided to take a jibe at Zuckerberg. Especially when it comes to the part of ‘innovation’ itself. But why so?

In an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, dated January 10, billionaire Zuckerberg slammed Apple for not bringing anything fresh to the table for a long time. Initially, he admired the world’s most valued company. But it didn’t take long for him to express frustration over Tim Cook and co. “On the one hand, (the iPhone has) been great, because now pretty much everyone in the world has a phone, and that’s kind of what enables pretty amazing things,” he said, as reported by CNBC on January 11. “But on the other hand…they have used that platform to put in place a lot of rules that I think feel arbitrary and [I] feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while,” he added.

Well, Zuckerberg’s comments went viral in no time on social media. And one user, @kendallbaker, who seemed to disagree with him, expressed his thoughts on X. “What, exactly, has Mark Zuckerberg/Meta invented other than Facebook? The f*****g “like” button? Instagram: Acquired IG Stories: Copied Snapchat WhatsApp: Acquired Oculus: Acquired” he wrote in a post on Sunday. Surprisingly, this post got a thumbs-up from none other than Serena Williams’ husband, Alexis Ohanian. As a former co-founder of Reddit, he seemed to agree with the user’s opinions. But he also made a revelation regarding the ‘Like’ button. “As the guy who created the upvote & downvote… imma leave this here” wrote Ohanian.

Along with his reaction, he shared an image as well. It showed ChatGPT’s response on the origin of the ‘Like’ button. As it seems, it was Ohanian’s platform that actually introduced the ‘Upvote’ and ‘Downvote’ buttons in 2005. On the other hand, Facebook came up with a similar feature in the form of the now-iconic ‘Like’ button in 2010.

Is he trying to imply that Zuckerberg, who’s slamming Apple for no innovation, didn’t invent the widely popular ‘Like’ feature? Surely, he’s thrown the ball in Zuckerberg’s court now. It will be intriguing to see if the Meta CEO has an answer.

In the past, however, Ohanian has been in support of him, backing his ambitious social networking platform. Remember when Zuckerberg decided to unveil Threads in competition with X (formerly Twitter)?

Alexis Ohanian has previously backed Mark Zuckerberg over his X rival

Back in 2023, Zuckerberg was looking to launch a tough competition to X. Interestingly, Ohanian had already left his previous venture, Reddit, in 2022, and he was exploring a bunch of fresh social media platforms at that time. When the Meta CEO introduced Threads in July 2023, Ohanian came up with a crucial point to reveal why Threads could be superior to X.

On his Instagram, Serena Williams’ husband shared a video while looking forward to Threads. “All right, everybody’s been asking me about Threads. Hot take: I like it, I signed up for it (you’ll notice Seven Seven Six got an account there too) and it’s a bold move by Zuck exploiting the weakness of Elon in this moment.” he said.

Further, he mentioned that the new platform would turn out to be better. Adding weight to his argument, he implied that whenever a new social media portal emerges, it tries to offer attractive incentives and features to gain new users and pose a threat to rivals. And because some platforms have no basis, they fade away in the long run. But with Instagram acting as the foundation for Threads, having an already massive userbase, it was having an edge.

“Now, Instagram has the audience, and has the creators. Overnight it was able to on board a bunch of people who have an incentive to now create content on Threads because they have a following on Instagram. Some portion of those followers are gonna come over to this other platform.” he added. Moreover, he also praised a solid feature that Threads was launched with. Similar to Reddit, it also had a comment sorting section.

Though he may not be on Zuckerberg’s side at the moment, it seems Ohanian’s early prediction about Threads was true. As it currently sits at over 270 million monthly active users, according to Backlinko’s report from December 2024.