Mark Zuckerberg says Meta will 'pour enough gasoline' on Threads to make it grow when it's ready for prime time

• Mark Zuckerberg sees an "awesome" and unexpected opportunity with Threads.
• The new app quickly gained 100 million users, although retention has proven more difficult.

After the record-breaking launch of Threads, the app has been losing ground in recent weeks. Elon Musk can't start celebrating yet, though.

On Wednesday, Musk's cage fight nemesis Mark Zuckerberg gave his most detailed assessment of Threads so far, and laid out Meta's longer-term game plan for crushing Twitter into the social-media dust.

"We have a lot of basic work to do," Zuckerberg told analysts during Meta's second-quarter earnings conference call. That includes building and experimenting with features that people like, he explained, while noting that some offerings won't always be "retentive."

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"A lot of people might like an experience, but you need to kind of tune it so that people who use it are continuing, and we feel like we're getting to a good place on that with Threads," Zuckerberg said. "There's still a lot of basic functionality to build, and once we feel like we're in a very good place on that, then I'm highly confident that we're gonna be able to pour enough gasoline on this to help it grow."

"Once we get to the point where it's at hundreds of millions of people, assuming we can get there, then we'll worry about monetization," the Meta CEO explained.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, and he's been changing so much about the platform that some users have gone looking for alternative sources of real-time online discourse. That gave an opening for Meta to try another one of its infamous cloning attempts. Threads was born in less that six months and with only 15 engineers working to build the product. Within a week of launch, it gained more than 100 million users, a record for a social-media app.

There are some recent signs that Threads users and engagement are flagging a bit. However, Meta launched the product quickly with few features. It has many updates to try in coming months and years. This week, it launched a follower content feed, for example.

On Wednesday, Zuckerberg mused that Meta has not had much success building standalone apps (beyond the original Facebook service and acquisitions such as Instagram and WhatsApp). He said this might be similar to the venture capital playbook, where funds make lots of investments and only one hits, once in a while. He theorized that Musk's Twitter meddling provided the catalyst for this rare opportunity.

"We're focused on taking this opportunity, which is an awesome one we didn't expect," Zuckerberg said, while noting that there's hasn't been an app for social discourse that has reached 1 billion people yet. "It's awesome we get a chance to work on this. I'm optimistic about where were are but it's a long road ahead."

Are you a Twitter or Meta employee, or someone else with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at khays@insider.com, on secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device.