A top lawyer for Twitter owner Elon Musk says the platform has “serious concerns” that Facebook parent Meta hired “dozens of former Twitter employees” in order to build its new “copycat” Threads app — accusations that Meta denies.
In a Wednesday letter addressed to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP partner Alex Spiro, a longtime lawyer for Musk and his businesses, notified the rival tech executive that Twitter’s new parent company plans “to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights.”
Spiro asserted that in rolling out its Threads social media app, which launched Wednesday, Meta relied on the work of “dozens of former Twitter employees” who “have improperly retained Twitter documents and electronic devices.”
“With that knowledge, Meta deliberately assigned these employees to develop, in a matter of months, Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ app with the specific intent that they use Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of Meta’s competing app,” the letter said.
In April, Twitter was hit with a proposed class action from former employees following Musk’s $44 billion deal to take the company private.
Competition is fine, cheating is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2023In response to reports of the letter, Musk wrote in a Twitter post, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
“Twitter has serious concerns that Meta Platforms has engaged in systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter trade secrets and other intellectual property,” Spiro wrote.
In addition to alerting the company of the prospect of a lawsuit, Spiro’s letter asserted that Meta is “expressly prohibited from engaging in any crawling or scraping of Twitter’s followers or following data.”
The letter did not specify which former Twitter employees Meta had allegedly assigned to its Threads development team or what intellectual property Meta purportedly misappropriated, outside of “trade secrets and other highly confidential information.”
Aggressive enforcement of intellectual property rights is a bit of a change for Musk, who in 2014 announced that his electric car company, Tesla, would open up its patents to other manufacturers interested in using its technology. As recently as last year, during an appearance on the CNBC show “Jay Leno’s Garage,” Musk declared that “patents are for the weak.”
Meta spokesman Andy Stone responded to Spiro’s claims in a post on Threads, saying that “no one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee.”
“That’s just not a thing,” Stone said.
First he fires almost all Twitter employees, some even almost without warning, and then he complains that Meta has hired them to develop Threads.
There’s no getting around it, Musk has only led to the failure of what was, in part, one of the social networks with great potential.
Well if what the guy said is true and nobody from twitter is working on it that should be exceedingly easy to prove. Elon will get creamed in court and have even less money than he did before. Let’s keep that train rolling. Dude thinks he’s fucking Jesus Christ. He’s just a little bitch boy that used daddy’s seed money and got insanely lucky with PayPal . That’s it.
People want Musk and Zuck to battle in the octagon. I want them to battle out it in court, all the way down to the last penny. It would be the greatest wealth transfer to lawyers ever.
I hope Zuckerberg takes Musk up on the dick-measuring contest because I want the world to know that neither of them are as well-endowed as they think they are.
TBH I think threads owes more to instagram than twitter… which makes total sense given that Meta owns both. They even share user lists… The similarity with twitter is they’re both primarily text based…
He’s just doing this to disrupt a direct competitor. He fucking hates that he cannot control the world and the internet . He fucking hates that he’s known as space Karen. He’s probably had a few dozen little bitch boy melt downs since all this twitter shit went down, and I’ll be honest, I’m fucking here for it.
The core features of Twitter aren’t rocket science, and Meta already knows how to scale. Computer science students often build tiny scale Twitter clones as a portfolio project. Another shitty take from Musk
- Fire people without knowing anything about the business, just for feeling powerful
- People go working for competition (it turns out employers don’t own employees for life)
- Competition is advantaged by the know how of these people
- Be mad
- Lawyers come with the idea that ex employees retained company property (because, again, you don’t own the person). Something either very stupid from Twitter to not ask for corporate equipment or blantly false
- …
- Profit (yes, he will profit anyway 🤷)
Musk will profit, but not likely in persuit of getting recompense from Meta, and from his whole Twitter excursion
Musk will never make a dime from Twitter.
IRC Musk also fired much of Twitter’s legal department. I wouldn’t be surprised if meta hired plenty of them too, so they know where the bodies are buried.
This isn’t the first time Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan have been involved in proceedings against Zuckerberg. I assume he’s more prepared this time around.
But Musk will likely get a settlement out of it. That’s simply how the world works. Shit floats.
Non competes aren’t worth the paper they are printed on in California.
